Diary of Jane
by RainingMonday
Summary: Three years after Mark broke Addison’s heart, he returns to LA to find her in an abusive marriage. Upon trying to save her before it’s too late, he discovers the web of intricacies she’s caught up in, including her controlling husband and a sick child.
1. Fading

'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
_Prologue_

It has become a sort of dance through shards of ice that will cut her feet if she slips, but she doesn't. So much depends on this, more than anyone will ever know. She tiptoes carefully, avoiding the fragments, tiptoeing around glittering splinters, knowing that one wrong step will incur a rush of crimson. Nobody notices how her fingers shake whenever she is too still; they're too focused on the perfect mask her face has fallen into. They don't see the jumps, the shivers, the shifts of her eyes. Nobody sees _anything_.

The evidence isn't invisible, but she never expected them to see her because her parents didn't and then Derek didn't and sometimes she checks, holding a fair forearm in front of her face, just to make sure that she hasn't gone translucent.

The evidence is there, even.

He'd see, she thinks, because he always saw. But he isn't here.

An earlier version of her would've called herself weak, but _that_ Addison didn't have her heartstrings all tied up and claimed like _this_ Addison does. Occasionally getting glass in her pale heel isn't making her stronger, necessarily, just more aware of her strength, of sacrifice, of how far she can be pushed.

No one knows. No one sees.

It's killing her slowly.

*'*''*''*'*

She walks a line between night and day, toeing it as carefully as a tightrope walker.

The walk up the sandy cobblestone path to her beachside house used to be a pleasurable unwind after a day of salvaging whatever babies she could from the clutches of emergencies and birth defects. Now her heart thrums uncomfortably against her sternum, as if this location makes her spontaneously tachycardiac. Her days are structured, predicable, but at night life can't protect her.

Addison unlocks the front door, the bracelets she'd arranged strategically on her wrist clanging softly, and steps in. It looks the same as ever, the large glass windows overlooking the ocean, the furniture in soft, comforting pastels and beiges. But this house will never hold the same comfort it did when she first toured it, fresh off the plane from dreary, miserable Seattle.

How much people would pay, to unwind time.

"Addison?" comes the usual shout from the living room, and she sighs upon discovering that it is nearly 5:30; Naomi held her up with some new questions.

"Yeah," she shouts back, teeth digging into her lip, wondering whether she should apologize for being late. Before she can decide, she's hit by a cannonball of strawberry blonde wisps and huge, sad, stormy grey eyes.

"Mama! Mama!" Marin coos, chubby little fingers grabbing at her knee until she sweeps the two-year-old up into her arms, breathing deeply to savor watermelon and raspberry shampoo, the last shard of sanity she still possesses. "Oo bah!"

"Yeah, baby, I'm back," she whispers into tiny seashell ears adorned with tiny crystal earrings before Marin twists and takes hold of Addison's nose, giggling softly. She suppresses the urge to examine her daughter fully, knowing that doing so with her husband leaning against the doorframe will only lead to a fight.

"You're late," Jack states neutrally, muscled arms folded across his chest. With deep green eyes she's discovered are nearly impossible to decipher, dark, coffee-colored hair, and handsome, clean-cut features, Jack is the sort of man her parents would actually approve of and women flirt with in the hopes of getting knocked up and roping him into a shotgun wedding. Add a law degree, a height of six feet, and betraying, disconcerting kindness, and you have Jack Deveraux.

Her husband.

"Sorry," she murmurs into Marin's shoulder, eyes cast downward, knowing that arguing is useless. The last thing her daughter needs is to see them in another fight. "Naomi wanted to talk … about, um, a patient."

"Is that all?"

"She wants to hang out more, she says she feels like we're drifting away from each other," she sighs, praying that this conversation will be over soon without negative repercussions.

"We're working on our marriage, and besides, she sees you everyday at work. Don't you think she's being a little bit clingy?"

Addison doesn't respond because Jack's question was rhetorical, like the many he feeds to accused criminals as a prosecutor, only the different is she actually realizes what an answer will result in.

"You going to do the dishes?" he asks a second later, ruffling the back of his short, deep brunette locks in a way she used to find endearing, and peeks around the corner to check the status of his basketball game.

"I'm actually pretty ti -" she begins to protest a bit feebly, but when Jack's eyes flash to Marin, who is lying on the floor, gazing up at her mother as if simply changing perspective can alter the reality she sees. But whether Marin looks at her upside down or right side up, their situation will be the same. She sighs and brushes past Jack back into the kitchen. "What do you say, Marin? You want to help Mommy put the dishes to bed?"

"No," Marin grins, pearly teeth bared in a mischievous smile so like her father's. "Wahna pway."

"After all the dishes are sleeping," Addison coaxes, hoping that one of her impromptu games will lure her daughter, she hasn't seen her all day and wants to feel little hands at the hem of her skirt instead of fruitlessly begging for Jack's affection. "The forks can't go to bed without your lullaby."

"Wuwwaby," Marin reconsiders, tapping one chubby finger on her pointed chin before toddling quickly back into the kitchen. Addison makes to follow her, but is hindered by Jack's firm grip on her upper arm.

"Addison," he says, leaning in close, and she curses the iridescent emerald pine of his eyes because she can't discern whether that's anger in their depths. They stand like this, two dancers engaged in a furious routine, until he releases her toward the kitchen. "Don't you think that skirt's rather short?"

It isn't really a question. She sinks down in front of the dishwasher; head on her knees, and tries to summon the courage to help Marin tuck the spoons in.

*'*''*''*'*

"Twin-keel twin-keel wittwah stah," Marin sings happily against the creamy expanse of Addison's neck as she carries the child upstairs wearily. Her room serves as both her bedroom and a nursery, because if Marin has an episode at night, she needs to be close by. There is a white sleigh crib in one corner, but Marin prefers the heavenly beige comfort of Addison's bed.

"PJ time, Rinny," Addison says, searching for the child in the mountain of down comforter. Giggles come from a large lump in the fabric and she allows a smile to grace her face, as she pretends that this is not only possible in their sanctuary, that her entire life is bathed in such serenity and beauty.

"Ha I won-duh wah oo ahr," the toddler sings happily as Addison pulls the pale pink sundress over the head of crimson wisps and holds her breath. But Marin's ivory skin is as flawless as ever, even as it is hidden by a strawberry patterned pajama top.

"Uh uh-buh dah wurld so ai!" Marin shrieks as she's assaulted by finger bent on tickling her. She squirms, tangling her small body into a cocoon in the sheets, until she suddenly goes still.

"Rinny, what comes next?" Addison prompts, her heart leaping up into her throat. "Remember? Like a diamond in the sky …"

"Nuh," Marin shakes her head and lays one delicate white hand so gently on Addison's arm she's prepared to swear the child can't be merely two. "Owie, Momma."

"Yeah," Addison agrees with a sigh. "Owie."

*'*''*''*'*

**I'm not even going to say I shouldn't be starting another story, but it's been so long since I've written I just decided to post this. It's just a short prologue, chapter one should be coming soon, as well as updates to my other stories. I hope you liked it and I think you can figure out what's going on, let me know what you think. Just a warning, it's rated M for a reason. Oh, and it's going to be Maddison, definitely, with other canon couples as well.**


	2. Falling

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
__Prologue_

**So here's the first chapter. It took a bit longer than I expected, but here it is :) A few things - it is currently rated T because I wanted it to show up, but it is an M rated story. Pairings are Maddison, MerDer, Alex/Izzie, Burke/Cristina (I know, shocker) and Callie/Arizona. Oh, and Marin's name is pronounced Mah-RIN, not Maren, just in case anyone was curious.**

*'*''*''*'*

_She hovers outside the examination room, her plum scrubs and surgeon hands at the ready if Dell should need her assistance. Everything appears to be going well with Amy Deveraux and her fiancé Eric, and the actual delivery will likely not take place for a few more hours so Addison drifts away from the door, already hearing Dell's protests if he found out about her hovering._

_The phones are silent, the paperwork filed, and this, this is exactly why she loved working in a hospital – the double benefit of thrill and constant action could always keep her mind occupied when she needed it to be. LA is peaceful, relaxing, exactly the kind of life she would have desired for raising a family, but she's alone and if she can't have the guy and the kids she thinks maybe she should go back to the job she loved, even if gossip and drama will inevitably accompany it._

_Addison pushes these thoughts out of her head, for now they are musing and will most likely stay that way at least in the near future, and finally notices the lone man in their lobby, flipping through a parenting magazine. A second, more thorough glance reveals he is well-dressed man candy. The entrance is otherwise empty and she hasn't seen Cooper or Sam for at least an hour (and somehow she doubts he's here to see Naomi) and it's Violet's day off so she steps around the desk and clears her throat._

"_Excuse me. Is there anything I can help you with?" she inquires politely and is immediately met by a gaze so vividly green and intense her heart skips a beat. The man's well-formed lips curve into a smile, the kind of smile that has her heart fluttering and her own smile on her mouth._

"_No, actually I'm just waiting for my sister, Amy. Amy Deveraux? She's in labor and she wanted me here because blood makes her fiancé queasy. Do you have any idea how she's doing?"_

"_Her labor is progressing slowly, you probably have several more hours here," she tells him, giving him a lopsided, rueful grin. "Babies have their own schedules."_

"_You sound like you're speaking from experience," the stranger grins, sweeping an arm toward the empty chair beside him._

"_Not really," she admits as her biological clock gives a particularly painful tick. The longing to have another tiny human inside her, growing under her nurturing influence, has not abated since the devastating news of her infertility and the grain of hope she discovered a few months later. "I'm a neonatal surgeon and OB/GYN, so it kind of comes with the job._

"_Very impressive, Doctor …"_

"_Montgomery. Addison Montgomery."_

"_So, no kids of your own, Dr. Addison Montgomery?" he asks just as her ovaries begin sending urgent messages to her brain about the (still unnamed) guy's perfect facial structure._

"_No, I … no." He cocks his head adorably and it's been so long since she's so completely had someone's interest that the rambling kicks in. "Not that I don't like kids. Or want them. It's just I have fertility issues and only two eggs left. Isn't that ironic? An infertile OB/GYN. And oh God, I just told a complete stranger I can't have kids."_

_To her relief, he laughs, loud and long with his head thrown back and soon she's chuckling as well in a sort of desperate, out of control way that she quickly curbs before he thinks she's any more of a freak. "I'm sorry," he breathes. "It's not funny, because that really sucks. But you just … the way you said that was just … would you by any chance want to have coffee with me?"_

"_Coffee?" she echoes blankly, because besides sleeping with Pete a few times (something that ended immediately when he and Violet patched things up) and tiptoeing around Sam (luckily he's stopped pressuring her into something she can never do) she hasn't had an offer for a real date in just about forever. "I don't even know your name."_

"_Well, come for coffee with me," the man retorts, scribbling something on what she realizes is a legal pad, but he tears it off halfway, so the name is missing, "and you'll find out." He presses the paper into her limp hands, gives them a slight squeeze, and hurries over to the nurse attempting to inform him that Eric has fainted and his sister wants him._

*'*''*''*'*

"I'm going to color the picture of green eggs and ham. Guess what color the eggs are gonna be, Dr. Sloan?" Nolan Hill asks, tilting a head of wild brunette curls as he regards the older surgeon. The pucker in his lip, left by a poorly performed cleft lip and palate procedure, nearly disappears with the boy's large grin and Mark allows a half-hearted smile to flit across his face as well.

Nolan's older than his grandson is right now, somewhere in the world, but the baby who would be nearly three might have chocolate locks from his unknown father, or the beryl hued eyes his mother and grandfather share, eyes that sparkle in another small face as Nolan awaits his answer.

"Hmm. Purple?" Mark guesses, suppressing a smile.

"No!" Nolan laughs.

"Orange?"

"No, _green_! Green, Dr. Sloan, 'cause it's called green eggs and ham. Get it?"

"Why didn't I think of that?" Mark asks, holding up Nolan's latest x-rays to the light and letting the fluorescent particles (or waves, depending on who you ask) filter through the whiteness of his bones. "Everything's looking good here, buddy. You ready for surgery tomorrow?"

Nolan nods, betraying anxiety for the first time that morning. Surgery is scary for any kid, but Nolan's been waiting six years for this, six years of stares and whispered questions because of some other surgeon's mistake. "Don't worry. It won't be that bad. You'll just get to wear a special hat and fall asleep. I bet you won't remember anything."

"Bet you five bucks I'll remember everything," Nolan argues, just as his parents push the door open, obviously having rushed here considering the steam still rising from their coffee and the still-wet tips of their hair.

"Nolan," Caroline admonishes gently but firmly. "What have I told you about talking to people like that?" Mark can tell she's hesitant to reprimand him the day before he goes into what could either salvage or destroy his life.

"Sorry, Dr. Sloan," the boy amends with another impish grin. "You can color the picture of the Cat in the Hat."

"And what color is he supposed to be?"

"The color of a _cat_, silly!" Nolan rolls his eyes, as if unable to fathom Mark's folly.

"Okay," Mark chuckles before selecting a blue crayon to decorate the stripes of the grinning feline's hat. Apparently he's doing something wrong because Nolan frowns, but his parents never read him anything like this as a kid (never read him anything at all, actually) so he's learning as he goes.

"Do you have any children, Dr. Sloan?" Caroline asks rather quickly, presumably to staunch whatever triviality her son has opened his mouth in preparation to utter. Mark is spared answering this particularly thorny question as someone knocks and salvation arrives in the form of Callie.

"Dr. Sloan. May I talk to you for a minute?"

Mark quickly extricates himself from the patient's family as he tries to bring any potential problems he has caused over the last week into the light. None come to mind, but as Callie is nearly in tears and the dresses and flowers and caterer have all been chosen Mark is rather bewildered. "Cal?"

"I've waited forever for this. Okay, maybe not forever, because there was the thing in Vegas with George, but I decided that didn't count. That doesn't count, dammit! This time it's for real and I'm happy and everything's perfect except she's _so _wrapped up in her own little world that she can't even bother to RSVP!" Callie explodes, somewhere between a shout and a sob and Mark quickly tugs her into an on-call room before she causes more spontaneous intern heart attacks.

"Cal, I'm here for you, I swear to God I am, but I really have no idea what you're talking about. The wedding isn't for two and a half months and between you and Arizona, you pretty much have it all covered," he says, preparing to duck in case the soothing words jar with her mood. Apparently eloping the first time around meant you had to go all-out Bridezilla for the second.

"Yo sólo quiero saber si ella viene. Eso es todo. Esto se supone que es el día más feliz de mi vida y lo menos que puede hacer es presentarse -"

"Callie, we've talked about the Spanish thing before," Mark sighs, but the midnight haired Latina continues to rant. "You want her to something. That is something. Something about a happy day and life. That's all I got, Cal. I don't know what you're saying!" he finally shouts over the smooth cadence of the foreign language.

"I want her to fucking come, dammit! I was there for her, I picked flowers with her happy, tan LA friends while she sat around and drank ginger ale, I let Naomi be the maid of honor, I endured her whining and her bitching for months straight so I think the least Addison can do is say she'll be here!" Callie shouts, but it falls on suddenly deaf ears.

He and Callie don't talk about Addison. Ever.

Mark knows the orthopedic attending still emails her occasionally, and Richard checks up on her, and Derek and Meredith went to her wedding a couple of years ago, but Addison is a taboo topic for him, a Pandora's box that others curiously desire to open but he keeps tucked close to his heart because he's wise enough to know what the redheaded temptress brings. Adultery, broken promises, dead babies, fake smiles, desperate, wounding love.

"She didn't … she doesn't respond to you either?" Callie was among the prized few who knew of the letter he sent to Addison shortly after returning to Seattle. In the midst of Sloane's abrupt departure and his anger toward Lexie, he felt he saw truly for the first time in years, and all he saw was her. He never received a response.

"No, she doesn't. She's so wrapped up in her perfect marriage in perfect LA with her perfect job that she doesn't care about me anymore, Mark!" Callie wails with increasing hysteria. Mark remembers the two days of the month when Callie and Arizona's periods run tangent and they must endure double bitchiness from the two and wonders whether this could be PMS (he blames Callie for the fact that he has a vague sense of what that is, medical degree aside).

Something's amiss in this situation. Addison not talking to him is one thing, but Addison not responding to her best friend is another. It's the first hint of something awry, the first twinge of uncertainty in his heart that will lead to the terrible secret he uncovers.

"Has Richard talked to her? Or Derek? Or Miranda, I know they email each other -"

"No," Callie states tearfully.

"That … doesn't sound like Addie," Mark states slowly as he attempt to shift out prejudiced thoughts from truthful ones that stem from what he knows of her. Thinking of her marriage stings in covert places, but he can't allow his bitterness to override the rational thinking this situation entails. He knows Addison – and she may have left him to go after Derek, and left him again to go to California, but she was on a plane mere minutes after he told her he needed her. He knows her still. This isn't her.

"You think … you think something's wrong?" is what Callie pulls from his vague statement.

"I … don't know what to think, Cal."

"Oh God, I've been … what if something really is wrong, Mark? What if she's sick? Or what is her husband's sick – or little Mar-"

"Wait, who?" Mark interrupts, but panic has imbued Callie so thoroughly that she's unaware she mentioned the child she swore on pain of death to keep a secret.

"Or what if she's dead? Or maybe one of her friends …"

"Callie! Addison is not dead. Someone would have told us." His assurances are as much for himself as they are for her.

"Yeah, you're right. God, I'm sorry Mark, I'm going all crazy lesbian bride on you," Callie sighs, but Addison is closer to her last assumption at that moment in California, under the glimmering golden sun, than either one of them will ever know. "I was _going _to ask you whether you were going to that conference in LA because I thought if you were …"

_You could see her. Check on her. Kick her bony ass for not answering, _Mark's brain supplies for his best friend. He wasn't going to go, because with Callie and Arizona's wedding, Cristina about to have her baby any day, and Meredith recently finding out her and Derek are about to be parents too, he feels like he's needed here, to be the steady anchor for all the insanity. Not to mention what's going on with Lexie and Izzie is back.

But Addison always comes first. Always. "Thanks for reminding me, Torres. I better pack for that," he says.

*'*''*''*'*

She is woken from her cocoon of perfect dreams and soft butter-cream blankets to a shout of "God Dammit!" from her husband and her daughter's helpless screams. She's out of bed in an instant, pulling leggings on under her silky nightdress that she only wears out of habit (Jack likes silk) and hurrying out of her room. Marin doesn't sound hurt or scared, just miserably wretched, and Addison remembers the slight rasp in the girl's voice from the night before.

"Where the fuck were you?" Jack demands as he scrubs fruitlessly at a pink Gatorade stain on what looks like Armani. "She won't stop screaming. I have an important case today and she woke me up at four."

Addison hurries past him to Marin, who has two streams of salty tears leading down to the cotton of her shirt. Her wide, pitiful slate eyes are so like her father's when he pleads that Addison's heart skips one painful beat, and in its absence the memories occupy her mind. For one instant, she is bathed in unconditional love, everlasting comfort as she is cradled in his arms. She resists the urge to wrap her limp, cold limbs around herself and pretend.

Swallowing a lump of painful nostalgia, she lifts Marin and as she cradles the toddler against her hip, Addison discovers that her daughter's body is alarmingly warm, and a peck on the forehead confirms her fever.

"She's sick, Jack, what do you expect? Why didn't you wake me up?"

"She's your damn kid, Addison, not mine," Jack retorts venomously and she finds it impossible to believe that this man promised over and over while she squeezed his hand in labor that he would raise Marin like a daughter even though half her DNA had been provided by another man. "Now shut her up, I have to leave!"

"I can't," Addison moans desperately as she presses a washcloth to the girl's sweaty forehead. "She has at least a 100 degree fever and she'll just get the other kids at the daycare sick. If you just let me -"

"No," Jack growls.

"Please, she's sick! I swear to God I won't leave; I won't go to work or anything. Just let her stay with me, Jack, please!" The pleads used to stick in her throat, because Forbes Montgomery's do not beg, but now they flow freely, well-worn but still in possession of a glimmer of hope that this time they will secure her child's salvation.

As rage eclipses Jack's eyes and he takes a menacing step forward, Addison knows she's gone too far. She clutches Marin tighter, incurring a slight whimper from the child, as Jack's large hand encloses around her forearm tightly. "You think I'm stupid?" he hisses. "You think I don't know that if I let you and that snot-nosed love child out of my sight for one second, you'll run? You're such a goddamn bitch, Addison; you bring this upon yourself!"

There is silence, because Addison doesn't dare respond for fear of repercussion with a baby in her arms. The only movement is the silvery trail of Marin's tear down her cheek, where it leaves an icy imprint on Addison's chest.

"Shit, I have to go," Jack groans as he glances at his Rolex watch. He reaches for Marin, but Addison shrinks away, arms tight around the only sliver of hope left in her life. "Give her to me." Another step. "Fuck, Addison, why do you do this to me?" Another step and he has Marin half out of her arms. "Let go!"

"Mama!" Marin shrieks in pain as Addison lunges away from Jack, cradling the two-year-old as if she were a much smaller child.

"Addison -"

"Jack, please!"

"Stahp! Stahpit!"

"Ja-"

Addison doesn't even have time to set Marin aside as Jack's fist connects with the side of her head and sends her sprawling over the coffee table, her only thought to protect the toddler sobbing, terrified, into her shoulder. She ends up on the carpeted floor with a throbbing pain just behind her ear and what she's sure will be a sunset colored bruise on her face. Marin wiggles out from under her mother's limp body to crouch behind the couch and instinctively tucks herself into a small ball of still chubby baby limbs.

Her lungs are heaving and she's barely caught her breath before she feels his fist again, this time in her stomach, injuring ribs that have been broken a few too many times. She bites her lip to keep from crying.

This monster isn't the man she married, the man who came to every single one of Marin's ultrasounds, the man who proposed on the beautiful boardwalk of Santa Monica. This man uses every negative emotion to fuel her punishments, whether it is a case lost at work or frustration at her noncompliance. This monstrosity doesn't care that there's a terrified two-year-old, still new to the world, still fascinated by blooming flowers and diaphanous butterflies, three feet away who will be as damaged by her mother's abuse as much as the recipient is.

His foots connects with her shoulder, and she recoils in pain. Another fist to the side of her face; things are becoming hazy. "Mama!" Gentle little hands on the ripped silk of her nightie.

The little hands gone, pushed away. Another blow to her stomach. The bruises are always deep and blue there, ugly markings of torture she endures.

Jack's still yelling at her, calling her stupid, whore, bitch. She wonders if it helps him sleep at night, and then wonders if she'll ever cease to sleep again.

She gets a well aimed kick in, causing Jack to double over, and shakily props herself up on arms spotted with the physical evidence of her pain, but before she can stand Jack has his hands around Marin's windpipe and Addison slumps, defeated.

As the two-year-old chokes, Addison can only be grateful that it isn't a knife this time. She's going to have a hell of a time explaining that scar he left on her neck to Marin's kindergarten teacher.

And with one last dizzying, devastating blow to the head, Jack knocks her unconscious.

This time when she wakes, her head is framed by blood tinged drool that has gathered on the carpet. Her entire body aches, and tears prick her eyes as she slowly sits, an arm wrapped gingerly around her injured ribs. Cutouts of bright sunlight made by the windows illuminate different portions of her body, like the fragments left on the inside are showing through to the outside as well.

Her heart sinks. Marin is gone. She shouldn't be surprised; Jack takes Marin to work with him everyday so she won't leave, and keeps the toddler's medicine locked up so escape is impossible at night.

She's standing in the middle of a minefield, and even a single movement shakes the unsteady balance Marin's life already hangs on. Jack's made it clear – one word spoken, one hint, even, and Marin will be dead. Life, even with her bastard of a husband in jail, would be empty without her child.

As she bundles the bloody nightgown and leggings into the garbage and ignores yet another call from Naomi in favor of doing her makeup, she wonders how much longer she'll last.

*'*''*''*'*

_Jack Deveraux is reclining in the lobby of Oceanside Wellness, waiting for his sister to get a move on and have her kid already. It's not that he doesn't care about her, he does, but he has an interview with a client accusing her husband of murdering their three-year-old and the potential prestige of the case makes it difficult wait patiently for Nature to have her way._

_The real reason he's here is that after his messy break-up with Heather, Amy became not suspicious, but a bit more nosey. Jack knows being here while her kid is born will reassure his image in her eyes. He loves his sister, but she never understood and never will._

_He's deep in dark memories, vacantly flipping through a parenting magazine when someone clears their throat. That's when he turns and sees the beautiful redheaded doctor who so resembles HER. One flash of brilliant crystal blue eyes and he knows he has to have her._

*'*''*''*'*

**I'd love to hear what you thought! This story will be rather dark so if domestic abuse or violence bothers you, please do not read any more. Next chapter Mark is in LA ...**


	3. Feigning

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
__Feigning_

*'*''*''*'*

_Her heart shouldn't be this fluttery, she's been on thousands of dates, most of them, admittedly, not in her late thirties, but she's got the dress and the shoes and the success and really nothing to be nervous about. All that's left in her life journey, really, is to secure love until she's ready to leave the earth, but for some reason she seems to be the perfect lay but no one's forever. It becomes wearing, after awhile, to return home to only Milo, whom her lavish affection has turned spoiled and moody._

_She only has so much time, so she called the stranger without a name and agreed to meet him at a coffee shop just a few blocks from the practice; she doesn't know she's sealing her fate with blood red wax._

_A bell tinkles merrily as she passes the threshold and takes in the scene around her: the earthy scent of coffee, plants spilling from windowsills that display the sparkling azure sea, and small antique tables placed intermittently through the small shop; she falls in love with it instantly. The mystery man is nowhere in sight so she orders a frappuccino and settles herself at the nearest table, willing her recently volatile stomach to calm._

_Ten minutes pass, porcelain teeth dig into full red lips, and being stood up shouldn't cause tears to pool in her eyes but she's been through so much lately, been rejected and left behind and tossed aside with such frequency that her tolerance and confidence have waned. She's strong, but not strong enough to be used, not strong enough to be alone forever._

_The cool, blended drink soothes her churning stomach, lulling her into a state of relaxation such that the woman trying to get her attention has to tap her shoulder repeatedly before Addison rouses herself._

"_Yes?"_

"_I think that man is trying to get your attention. He's been rapping the glass for the last two minutes," the woman informs her with undue exasperation as Addison twists in her seat only to find her mystery date seated outside, waving at her. She grins back and stands, the warmth of being wanted pervading her._

"_Thought I stood you up?" he smirks, gesturing at the seat across from him, which she takes, trying to keep the scorching metal from touching the bare part of her legs exposed by her dress._

"_No," she states, but she can see by the glint in his eye that he knows she's lying._

"_A nice guy like me wouldn't do that."_

_She rolls her eyes. "I don't even know your name."_

"_Guess." She gives him an incredulous stare when she realizes he's serious, and he pushes a powdered doughnut toward her and lounges back in his chair, indicating that he has time. Her eyes narrow in on the way his muscles ripple under his designer button-up, and her mouth waters a little._

"_Um, Greg?" she suggests, naming her previous patient's overly attentive husband._

"_No."_

"_Derek?"_

"_Really? Do I look like a Derek?" he teases._

"_No. I was just making sure, because that's my ex-husband's name," she explains, and then cringes, because she's already managed to bring up her incredible amount of baggage on their first date. Stupid, stupid Addison, she chides herself._

"_I take it that didn't end well?" the man infers cannily, although he misreads her mortified expression._

"_Not exactly," she chuckles, but doesn't offer further details when he raises his eyebrows. "That is a discussion for another day."_

"_So we're going to meet another day?"_

"_Are we?"_

"_Only if you can guess my name," he jests._

"_Um … Joe?"_

_She never guesses his name but by the end of the date knows that it is Jack, and that he is a lawyer at a respected firm only a few miles away, and that his last girlfriend, whom he had dated for two years, left in the middle of the night without so much as a note of explanation. Addison, in turn, tells him about life as a neonatal surgeons (he's interested in the gore of surgery), about Naomi and her other friends at the practice, about how she used to live in New York._

_They make plans for Wednesday night at seven. She mistakes the desire in his eyes for interest._

_But first, something adds up._

*'*''*''*'*

In earlier years that are dominated, in her memory at least, by silver braces and awkward gawkiness, Addison explored her creative side (or rather, Bizzy forced her to) and played the alto saxophone in her high school's marching band. This did not prevent her from sitting alone at her own table at lunch every day, or the lisp that even Archer occasionally mocked, but Addison reasoned later that it bestowed upon her fingers the dexterity she so prized in surgery.

She always thought it could have been her second calling, only, of course, if surgeon or ruler of the universe fell through.

But now she thinks she should have explored the fine arts a little more, because her face could be a freaking Picasso, quality wise, at least. There's no proof that a clot of blood oozing from the side of her head had stained the oatmeal colored carpet just half an hour ago. The violet bruise slowly blossoming on her other cheek is hidden by a flawless blend of face powder and cover up. She rotates her head slowly in the mirror of the practice's bathroom to evaluate the necessity for any last minute touch-ups, but she looks perfect.

This was what she had wished for, as the geeky sax player whose name was only said in malicious whispers behind beautiful girls' hands. All she wanted then was to be beautiful, successful, and married, maybe with a couple of kids to show for it. It's all a farce, and the rush of water into the basin below encourages her to wash it all off.

But she can't. Her oppression by Jack is the only thing keeping Marin alive; the toddler is so fragile that all her husband would have to do is wait for her tiny heart to give out. Diagnosed with Congestive Heart failure, Ebstein's anomaly, and a ventricular septal defect at birth, Marin was on medicines before she was even an hour old. The septal defect was repaired by surgery, but as a preemie she was too delicate for the more complex procedure that would completely repair her heart.

Sometimes, Addison blames herself. Mark broke her heart shortly after they conceived Marin, and although it is genetically impossible, she thinks she may have somehow passed it on to her unborn daughter.

Now she's on diurectics, amiodarone, an anti-arrhythmic drug, and metoprolol, a beta-blocker that reduces the force which her small, fist-sized heart contracts, therefore alleviating an iota of stress placed on the slowly failing muscle. All of these medicines, while prescription drugs, would be simple for her to procure as a doctor.

Digoxin is a medication derived from foxgloves, which are beautiful but deadly flowers. Her daughter receives it to regulate her heart rate and relax her blood vessels, and for these purposes it works extremely well, keeps Marin alive. The problem is that Jack has hidden this medicine. The problem is that Digoxin's toxicity levels are so high that even a deviation of a single nanogram from the dosage could kill the two-year-old.

The problem is that when the medicine was first administered, Marin had an adverse reaction that landed her in the hospital for a week. The dosage was changed. Jack and the physician who treated her, one of his friends, incidentally, know it. Addison doesn't. A wrong guess could kill her.

She's trapped, a fly in a spider's web, as the life force is slowly drained from her.

Satisfied with her appearance and aware that she has a patient in about fifteen minutes, Addison gathers her things and heads for the door, adjusting the long, filmy sweater that obscures her bruised forearms. Her distraction causes a run-in with Naomi, however, who seems to have had the same idea of a little last-minute primping in the bathroom.

"Hey," she breathes to her best friend, eyes cast down because she knows their skyline depths will leak telltale signs of tragedy if they meet the chocolate brown orbs that exude concerned suspicion. Jack hates Naomi and finds her meddling irritating, as he has informed Addison angrily on several occasions. She imagines her best friend harbors similar feelings for her husband, but conceals them out of respect for her.

She attempts to brush past her friend but Naomi steps in front of her, examining Addison carefully. She knows the other woman suspects something, but if she opens her mouth she might spill it all and if Jack gets wind of even a single word uttered, Marin will be dead before she can draw another breath. And although the idea of Jack in jail is satisfying, it wouldn't bring her daughter back, maybe the only child she'll ever have, a glimmer of light in her otherwise shrouded life.

"I don't understand you," Naomi states, resting one gentle hand on Addison's upper arm, unaware of the tender bruises underneath the thin layer of fabric. "You have a kid and get married and you pretend that you're happy, but we all see that you aren't. You go home right after work, avoid Violet like the plague, and brush all of us off if we ask if anything's wrong. I don't … I don't know you anymore."

"I'm sorry," Addison apologizes hollowly. "Things are just … really busy, Nae, with Marin. It's hard, you know, watching her waste away, day after day? You and Sam and Violet and Pete and Dell, you don't understand. Your children aren't dying."

"Addie, Marin may be sick, but she isn't dying yet. You can't live your life in fear that something is going to happen, because that's not living at all." Addison doesn't respond, so Naomi interprets this as permission to continue. "I'm worried about you; you need to pull it together. Addison Forbes Montgomery doesn't -"

"I have a patient. I have to go." She wrenches her arm out of her best friend's grasp, suppressing a wince as she does, and manages to get her body through the door before promptly collapsing against the wall. She's learned that the injuries reduce her stamina but that another hit still won't shatter her like glass.

Violet passes her in the hallway and she quickly averts her eyes and increases the speed with which her heels tap the floor. She still catches Violet's frown and can imagine her and Naomi in front of the mirror, psychoanalyzing her life; she's already flushed one too many bottles of antidepressants down the toilet. The clock on her wall informs her she still has eleven minutes, so she opens a desk drawer and tenderly pulls a large book from within.

Addison had never been good at crafts and even though selecting stickers and paper patterns and glitter was fun, it took several tries and a couple of frustrated store assistants before Marin's scrapbook looked like it was assembled by a grown woman, who also happened to be a world class surgeon, instead of a twelve year old. She's tried to find mostly happy pictures to put in here, ones where Marin wasn't in the hospital and she wasn't bruised practically beyond recognition. There's one of her shortly after giving birth, exhausted and sore because she refused the epidural (she wanted to experience the birth of her only child undiluted) but still radiant with Marin cradled against her chest. There's another with Marin and Lucas covered in wild strawberry juice at Pete and Violet's barbeque and another of Marin hugging an extremely displeased Milo.

She's planning on sending it to Mark, because she thinks of him and the life she could have had and knows that he would do anything for them. He deserves an explanation, though, of why she kept their child from him. At first, it was for him, so he could be with Lexie, and later it was for her, so she could live her fairytale with Jack. Never once, she realizes belatedly, had the decision been made with purely Marin in mind.

Addison places a ducky sticker next to the picture of Marin in the bath with a mohawk, and her eyes fall on the post-it temporarily attached to the last empty page.

_I know you might be mad, _the note says. _But there are two sides of every story._ Under it lays the envelope of photographs that depicts the other side of their life, the photos where Marin is pale and hooked up to machines and Addison has a black eye and a split lip but her daughter is begging for her mother to be in the picture with the crab she found on the beach.

*'*''*''*'*

"_Jack! Jackie, who is it?"_

"_Shh!" Nine-year-old Jack presses his finger urgently to his lips, because Amy's voice is tinny and shrill and sure to be heard even over the cacophonous dinner party below. The four-year-old obeys and sinks down beside her brother and the two kneel, swathed in moonlight, hands gripping wrought iron railings, as their father opens the door._

_Edward Deveraux greets his guest with warm murmurs whispered into curled crimson locks, secret nothings that the children, one in a frilly pink nightgown, the other in oversized flannel, cannot hear. The woman presses red lips to their father's cheek and allows him to remove the voluptuous fur coat that hugs her slim body, revealing a midnight blue evening dress that makes Amy gasp._

"_Daddy brought us a princess for Christmas, Jackie!" Amy squeals, bouncing up and down on stick-thin thighs as her teddy bear tumbles out of her lap. Jack snags it before it falls below and onto the head of the 'princess', although his mischievous nine-year-old self would love to see it fall. Jack is shrewd, though, observant, and jaded enough to trade pranks for knowledge, for the latter is an ocean current against a tiny, babbling stream._

"_I don't think that's a princess, Aimes," Jack warns before his little sister becomes too excited. She's vibrant in the dim glow; dark curls bouncing, emerald eyes aglow; she doesn't remember the late Augustine Deveraux and likely never will. Jack does, though, almost as well as he remembers a parade of women sneaking into their house, his house by night, entering his father's room less than a month after his mother's death._

"_Who is she, then?" Amy asks, eyes glimmering with admiration as their father sweeps the younger woman further into the depths of his house._

"_I think that's Vivian," Jack sighs._

_Amy wrinkles her nose and nearly sends her teddy flying again, this time into a large bowl of lurid red punch. "Who's that?"_

"_Dad told us about her, remember?" Jack explains with a tinge of impatience in his voice. "He's always going off to spend time with Vivian." As if the woman could hear him, piercing, green-blue eyes connect with his and Jack shivers. She's elegant, flawless; an ice queen who has infiltrated their palace once filled with laughter and light, and Jack's body swells with fear and hate simultaneously. Vivian looks away a moment later, scarlet curls bouncing, and Jack inhales sharply._

"_I thought he just had an imaginary friend," Amy chirps happily. "I didn't ever saw her so I thought she wasn't real." _

_Later, their father will introduce them, and the fate of Jack Deveraux, Vivian Montgomery, Addison Montgomery and Marin Sloan will all be decided._

*'*''*''*'*

A hallway stretches out before him, tiled with squares of black and white, shrinking into the distance, lined with doors of red. He feels rather like Alice and wonders whether any of the small green plants rooting through the cracks are supposed to be eaten; he also wonders what that stewardess put in his scotch.

It is only when he begins to walk, placing one foot tentatively in front of the other, that he discovers his feet are bare, frigid chunks of ice against the marble floor. The plants hiss when he steps on him, but he continues forward, to the hallway that seems to get narrower as it stretches into the distance (he vaguely wonders whether the passage appears bigger in the distance behind him, but doesn't turn to look).

Then he blinks, and she's there.

"Addie?" he calls, his voice reverberating through the warped hallway disconcertingly, but he receives no answer from the woman draped in blood red further down the corridor.

Mark steps forward, and Addison's eyes, shards of blue-green ice, flash to his, and for a second he's wary of their fey nature, of the emotions contained in them, because this isn't his Addie.

Except she's always his Addie.

"Addison." It is more an acknowledgment than a query now, and his footfalls increase in frequency as he jogs closer to her, although the distance between them remains the same. She smiles; it doesn't look right. "Addison, talk to me."

She doesn't.

"I'm sorry. I made a mistake leaving you, I didn't love Lexie. Not like I thought I did. Please, babe," he pleads, but she only regards him coolly, her smile almost satanic in its wickedness. "Addie!"

He's running now and can't decide if the increase in proximity is a cruel trick of his brain or if he's actually closer to smelling her soft skin, the scent of sunshine and New York and vanilla and Addison; or if he's really any nearer to the red strands that frame her face, the soulful eyes, the rose petal lips.

His feet make no sound against the marble.

"Mark!" she finally calls, her entire body shuddering, and then she bleeds. Mark skids to a stop before doubling his pace, trying to get to her before her veins pour forth every last ounce of her life force, but the cuts well with crimson and by the time he reaches her, she's just a puddle at his feet.

"Addison!"

"Sir -"

"Addie!"

"Sir!" Mark opens tightly shut eyelids and finds that not only are his closest neighbors and two flight attendants staring at him strangely, his chest is also heaving and he's effectively moistened his grey t-shirt with sweat. _Addison_, he thinks immediately, but she's safe here, with the man of her dreams, or so he has been led to believe for the last two years.

He wishes she still needed him because then he wouldn't feel so pathetic needing her.

"Sir, are you all right?" the stewardess prompts, to his mortification. "We just landed in LA."

"I'm fine," Mark grumbles, glaring at all his nearest neighbors until they look away uncomfortably. Addison is his vice, the one drug he can never quit, the one fix he will always need, the one habit he'll never be able to break. He'll have to keep praying to a god he barely acknowledges that he believes in because she's his forbidden fruit and he may be going to hell for it.

Eve may have caused humanity's downfall, but Mark can't blame her for it.

He exits the plane quickly, weaving through families and old ladies with too many carpet bags until he reaches the busy terminal in LAX. A bone dry cappuccino does little to clear his mind as he stands in the sun, gazing out at the palm trees and waiting for the taxi that will take him to her again.

The conference is long forgotten, as is her husband. He needs to see her; it's been too long.

On a whim, he asks the cabbie to stop at the nearest strip mall and procures a bouquet of white lilies, marveling at their perfect depths, the unique texture of the petals and the way the anthers contrast with their snow-white silky depths.

Then he remembers Addison open under him like a flower, skin nearly as white and ten times as soft, red hair fanned out over a pillow, and his heart beats faster. He isn't sure whether he'll be able to leave without her this time.

*'*''*''*'*

_The world spins, blurring the bright hues of her comfortable office, as she tries to focus on individual threads in the carpet, to no avail. Convinced she is about to loose the green juice and two pumpkin scones she had for breakfast, Addison falls against the glass door, rattling the closed blinds, where she remains until she is sure she can make it to her desk without vomiting._

_A bead of sweat paints a glimmering trail down her forehead as she utilizes the mahogany of her desk as support for her weak, aching body._

_She can't say _it _hasn't crossed her mind, but she can't deal with one line or two at this point in her life, so she avoids, pretends it isn't only in the mornings she is bent over the toilet, that the tampons she purchased a few months ago haven't gone untouched. She skirts coffee and alcohol as well, however, just in case, but has ceased to touch any region of her abdomen at all._

_Preoccupied with attempting to control her body, Addison discovers she didn't lock the door when Naomi and Violet burst in simultaneously, both a little out of breath and bearing a strangely-bulging bag. She's intrigued, but she doesn't let on._

"_Okay, this? This has got to stop," Naomi states firmly, moving toward Addison as if afraid of scaring a wild animal._

"_Denial isn't getting you anywhere," Violet adds, and Addison is seized with a sudden desire to run from this intervention. The only problem is that the other two women are blocking the door._

"_We have brought chocolate, we have brought candy, and we have brought alcohol for the two of us, but Addison, it's time to accept this."_

_Addison finally graces them with a steely gaze. "Whatever you two know that I don't -"_

"_Addison," Violet chides._

"_You will drink this water, you will go in that bathroom, you will close the door, and you will pee on these goddamn sticks, Addison. Then you will eat some chocolate, drink some more water, and pee on some more sticks, and prove me wrong, or so help me, you are not leaving this room," Naomi informs her, waving around a couple of pregnancy tests, still in their boxes, for emphasis. "Right, Violet?"_

"_Yep, as long as I can open the Merlot."_

*'*''*''*'*

**Sorry, this chapter took a bit longer than I anticipated. Rest assured that the next one is what everyone has been waiting for :) Also, while most of the flashbacks are to show how Addison and Jack got together and Marin was born, a few, like the second one in this story, will reveal events that happened a long time ago (I hope everyone caught that that was Jack's childhood) like who the mysterious Vivian Montgomery is (you can guess in a review ... or tell me what you thought in general). The next update should come sooner, I've been waiting to write it!**

**Oh, and Shonda said she wants to reunite Maddison possibly sometime in the future. Hehe. I'm happy :D. She better make good on that.**


	4. Uncovering

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
__Feigning_

**I know. I am a terrible person. It has been far too long ... feel free to throw a various array of objects at me. But this is an extra-long chapter, just for you, that has taken me an age to write because I just couldn't get it right, so I hope you like it. Next update should come sooner (I know I always say that :/) but no promises because I've been looking at colleges and all that crap really eats up your time.**

*'*''*''*'*

_It is only after spending half an hour chugging water, crying, peeing on sticks, crying, and purposely not looking at the result windows of said sticks does Addison realize how small her office bathroom really is. She kind of hates it. Maybe she'll turn it into a closet._

_She's sure the reason for Naomi and Violet's patience stems from the wine and chocolate they are enjoying outside her door, and if she didn't know better, she'd think all the giggling and moans of chocolate delight indicated other inappropriate activities. Such as the ones, on that very floor, that had landed her in this bathroom._

_She could be a mother, right now. In nine months, give or take, she could be cradling an infant, caressing soft, downy hair, breathing in the scent of her child. She could also be, conceivably, in one or two months devastated as the pregnancy halts by nature's hand. She's not yet forty in actual years but her fertility, according to Naomi's tests, is a few years ahead of her._

"_Shouldn't she be done by now?" Naomi's voice sounds from the outside and Addison cringes. She knows that there's only a small window of time before the results become indecipherable, but she can't bring herself to look. She's been pregnant by Mark once before, and while these circumstances are marginally better for bearing a child, he's still off with another woman._

_There is a knock. "Addison?" Violet calls. "I just took one of those a year ago, I know it doesn't take that long!"_

_Addison doesn't respond. To look, or not to look? Frantically, she stands, because the pregnancy tests around her are starting to make her claustrophobic, but she knocks a couple off the counter, so they're facing up. She quickly closes her eyes._

"_Do you think we were wrong?" she hears Naomi mutter to Violet._

"_She's been leaving morning meetings to go throw up in the bathroom for more than a month now," Violet reasons. "Also, Pete felt the need to inform Cooper the other day that her boobs are bigger. I think we're right, I just don't understand. I thought she wanted a baby?"_

"_She does. Or did. I told her it was unlikely, and it was true, based on the tests I did. What this pregnancy says about that, well … stress could have played a factor in it, made it seem worse than it really is. But having a baby like this … you had two guys there for you. She doesn't have anyone."_

"_So it's Mark's?" Violet infers._

"_It would have to be. I know she was sleeping with Pete a few weeks ago, but this has been going on longer than that."_

"_And Mark is in Seattle."_

"_Yep. With the sister of the woman Derek left her for."_

"_Ouch," Violet whistles._

"_Yeah," Naomi sighs, pushing herself off Addison's couch to solve the problem at hand. A sharp, rapid rap on the door garners no response, as Addison is curled up on the floor and virtually catatonic. "Addison!" she shouts. "You need to come out of there. Pregnant or not pregnant, this isn't doing you any good!" All she receives is a muffled sob in response._

"_Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" the shrink inquires of the fertility doctor._

"_Yes," Naomi states definitively. "We need reinforcements."_

"_I was actually talking about the credit card in the door trick," Violet says to an empty doorway. "But that works too. More wine for me!"_

"_What did you need me for?" Pete asks Violet a couple of minutes later as he and Naomi reenter, Sam at their heels. "Naomi won't tell me."_

"_No, I wouldn't tell you where half of the practice would hear. We need you to open that door," Naomi says through her teeth. "Right now."_

_Pete frowns. "Who's in there?"_

"_Addison," Violet answers." And she won't come out because -"_

"_Oh my God," Sam, who had been until that moment, a silent lurker, says loudly, picking up a wayward pregnancy test box off the floor. "Is she pregnant?"_

"_Oh my God," Pete repeats, looking faint._

"_She might be, and no, it's not yours," Naomi snaps at Pete, who visibly relaxes._

"_Whose is it, then?" Sam asks, an edge to his voice. "I told her she shouldn't be sleeping around."_

"_She's not. She's slept with a total of two guys in the last seven months, Sam."_

_Sam mumbles something indecipherable._

"_What was that? Why the hell do you care, Sam?"_

"_I just do."_

"_Pete, the door," Violet prompts, more interested in the possibility of another child, and more drama, this time not about her, arriving at the practice than about why Sam cares so much about Addison's bedfellows. Pete tries the handle halfheartedly for a minute before shrugging._

"_If she's not going to come out on her own … maybe you should just give her some time," he suggests casually._

"_Are you the therapist here?" Violet demands. "No. You are not. She doesn't need time, she needs to face this."_

"_All right, all right," Pete backs off, hands raised. "In that case, does anyone have a credit card?"_

"_Hey! Why wasn't that a good idea when I suggested it?" Violet pouts._

"_A credit card?" Naomi complains. "I thought you were supposed to be some kind of macho gladiator cowboy."_

"_That was a fantasy, Naomi," Pete scolds. "Besides, if Addie needs a gladiator, maybe you ought to call Mark Sloan, as he did succeed in knocking up an infertile woman."_

"_God, no," Sam says. "Can we not mention Mark Sloan, like, ever again?"_

_Violet snaps her fingers. "Credit card!" she demands, and finally, out of sheer annoyance, Naomi produces her gold-plated specimen, which Violet proceeds to swipe through the crack of the door. Apparently Addison's bathroom is not high security, as the lock gives and the two women are able to wrestle it open._

"_Oh … oh my," Naomi breathes._

"_Pete, Sam, out! Right now!" Violet commands, pointing toward the door._

"_What - ?" Pete asks before he is pushed out the door by a concerned Sam, whose eyes meet those of his ex-wife's indiscernible chocolate ones before he disappears._

"_Oh, Addie," Naomi sighs, and Addison imagines she knows what her friend is talking about. She always seems to end up doing things in messy, alternative ways that result in feelings with compound fractures and self-esteems with permanent puncture wounds. The ending of her marriage, her affair, her childhood, her parents, even her very entrance into the world was fraught with the same adversity as every one of her proceeding milestones._

_Addison watches motionlessly as her friends gingerly collect the pregnancy tests and sort them, depending on their results, before picking up the water and juice bottles along with mascara-stained toilet paper tufts and disposing of the mess she'd made. The willpower to look, however, to find out how she will spend the next eighteen years of her life isn't there. There are three piles of pregnancy tests, one large, the other two quite small and sparsely populated. She knows one is for those with no or illegible results, but the other two tell whether she is sharing her body with another living, growing human being that will henceforth be her life._

_Unfortunately for Addison's lack of preparation, Naomi feels obligated to inform her of the results. "Consensus is … you're pregnant, sweetie."_

*'*''*''*'*

Apparently rain is not universally confined to Seattle, Mark discovers as the sky releases her tears in a sudden soft drizzle that coats the shoulders of his grey t-shirt in a dusting of droplets. He knew this, in theory, but up until a few days ago when Callie's fated words had disrupted his assumptions, he'd seen her lying in the sun, warmth hugging every familiar curve, glossy red waves highlighted by the endless luminescence.

But just like his illusions of her happiness and his own, this is easily dispelled in a sudden downpour of reality.

The last time his feet found purchase on this cobblestone pathway he was so worried about Sloane that his memories of miniature green plants lining the cute walkway are dim, but now that he's hesitating and clutching the lilies he'd purchased a little too tightly he sees every little detail, every quirk that to him screams Addison.

Mark swore when she left for Los Angeles in the first place that he would never chase her again, that he was done trying to make her want him. What he didn't see then and what is clear to him now is that they both needed time, she to recover from the dissipation of eleven years, and he to grow up, to prove to himself that he could be what she needed. Unfortunately their development has never been in sync, he was ready when she was not, then she was ready when he was not. Or something like that.

There's a car in the driveway even though it's midday so Mark presses the doorbell surrounded by decorative wrought iron and waits, shifting his feet, to see her. Apparently all his restlessness over the past few years, all the doubts, the drunken nights, have been due to him trying to live a life he doesn't belong in. He always saw domestication with her and when he tried to adapt it to other relationships it never quite fit.

He stands fidgeting on the porch, wishing he hadn't brought the pouring crystal droplets with him from Seattle, until all too quickly the chime of a lock unhinging signals that there is someone at the door. He doesn't know what he'll say if it's her husband, because truth be told the thought that it might be him is never fully conceived of nor acknowledged. White wood and rippled glass give way to his life's missing piece, and finally, he can breathe again.

Addison's hair is as fiery as ever, but pulled haphazardly back, framing a face with bones more prominent than he has ever seen them, even more so than the her days of abandonment in New York. Her beauty is still without flaw, but touched with tragedy now, and different from the carefree, vibrant girl he first met in medical school. One hand rests on the brass doorknob as she stares at him, the other hangs limply by her side, accentuating the shock in eyes the color of summer in the Mediterranean.

"Mark," she says finally, almost helplessly, and he knows how that feels because he has maintained the impression that fate threw her in front of him one day just to prove he could be knocked off his feet.

"Addison," he replies, a wry smile tugging at one corner of his mouth as he holds out the lilies for her observance and hopefully, acceptance. Her hands wrap around the crinkly gauze, eliciting screams of inanimate protest, and the bare ghost of a smile touches her lips as well before she turns toward the interior of her house.

"What are you doing here, Mark?"

"I needed to see you."

She walks further into the house, a thin, diaphanous sweater floating around her slim form and proud posture. "You shouldn't be here," she says, but offers no further protest when his expensive Italian dress shoes find home on her plush carpet, next to those that undoubtedly belong to another man (his stomach clenches painfully, he still, unrightfully, perhaps, but verily regards her as his).

"Tell me to leave and I will," he challenges, because he knows her, can sense when she's in pieces inside. She whirls around, eyes flashing turquoise, but doesn't answer. He smirks.

"What do you want, Mark?"

"You."

A bitter laugh escapes her angel-kissed lips. "Right. You painted some fantasy, left me here for Little Grey, and didn't call me back. I'm supposed to believe that you want me now?"

"I wrote you a letter saying I wanted you back, saying I always loved you, and you ignored me, and yet here I am."

As if pulled by invisible strings, her brow scrunches. Words attempt to pass through her lips several times only to be retracted before they can reverberate for him to hear. When she is finally able to form coherent communication, she says, "a letter?" faintly, as if unable to comprehend such a concept. "You sent a letter."

"A couple months after I left, yeah," he retorts defensively, as if she is doubting the verisimilitude of his statement, but the truth is he can't apprehend the emotion clouding her sky blue eyes.

"That's funny, because," she gives a small, humorless laugh as she gazes at over his shoulder, as if trying to keep from crying, "because I called you. About three months after I left, I called you because … I had something to tell you. I needed you too, and … you never called me back."

"Who answered the phone?" he inquires, confused.

"Lexie Grey."

"Damn it," Mark swears suddenly, because Fate seems determined to mess this up, and Addison cringes. "Addie, I swear to God I didn't know. If it had -"

"If you had, what?" the crimson haired goddess demands in a weary voice. "What do you honestly think would have happened, Mark? You would have miraculously changed your mind and come down to LA? Swept me off my feet? We would have lived happily ever after? I'd already met Jack by that point, Mark, and really, after all that's happened, I don't believe in happily ever after anymore."

"What happened to the girl who still had her collection of Disney princess videos?" Mark demands from one side of her living room. A spectator ignorant of their past, watching through the rain stained window, might have assumed they were just another married couple engaged in a fight, judging by their mannerisms. "What happened to the girl that made snow angels in Central Park, who told me that she believed I had a soul mate out there, if I just stopped sleeping around and looked for her?"

"She chose the wrong guy, and now she realized her and her soul mate were never meant to be together and –"

The rest of Addison's tragic anecdote is cut off by the urgent press of Mark's lips against hers; she didn't even see him move across the room but then the sharp edge of the counter is digging into her spine and it is disregarded in favor the ecstasy of his mouth moving with hers, with every hard muscle creating a livewire of her abused body. Adultery was a path she never intended to walk again, but Mark is her continual downfall, and sweet as he tastes, he's her ultimate sin and resistance, in the end, is futile.

The tempo of their connecting lips slows, each soft union is tender and meaningful and Addison's not sure she'll be able to stand any time in the near future. It's not about finally feeling loved, or the wonderful things Mark said, it's about blue-grey eyes of storm that somehow have a calming effect, it's about the gruff voice that is kind of like a lullaby to her soul, it's about feeling complete. The experience is so poignant that liquid diamonds gather in the corners of her lashes, and when Mark spins her around so the island is no longer mauling her, they fall.

His thumbs, marked more by their gentleness and precision than size, of course catch the tears before they fall far, but this most affectionate of gestures has repercussions neither of them could have ever predicted.

Jack awoke Addison at 8:06 that morning. He was out the door with Marin, a little less sick than the day before, by 8:29. Addison covered up her day-old bruises, in addition to completing her usual morning routine, by 8:47, and arrived at work at 9:02.

It began to rain at 10:14.

Her make-up isn't waterproof.

The saline moisture folds under his fingertips and is dispersed across her porcelain cheek, where it erodes careful, artistic layers of foundation and face powder to reveal a deep plum bruise on her right cheek. He doesn't notice at first; neither does she, both are too occupied with the way his lips brush hers, so gently that if not for the heat coursing through her veins, she might have thought the caress was naught but the wind.

No matter what Jack has done, it is still wrong, and Addison is squirming in his arms, trying to convince herself to stop him, but he is such a tempting vice. _Marin_, she thinks. _If Jack found out … I have to stay strong for Marin_. But she never knows whether she would have possessed the ability to pull away from Mark, an unknowing threat to her daughter's safety, because when the pads of his fingers find the damaged skin he inhales sharply and drops his hand.

"What the fuck …"

"What is tha – Addison, did he hit you?" She's a marble statue of shock and shame before him, eyes cast down, and the answer is plain enough. "Does he hit you?" Mark repeats, changing the context of the question, his touch gentle as he explores the skin disbelievingly and his eyes burn behind their icy hue.

This wasn't how she pictured him finding out, not with Marin's life hanging in the balance, not with him still not knowing of his daughter at all. Her body shudders as she breathes, still in his arms because his hands are resting on her hips, as if she'll shatter to pieces in his arms.

"I -," she chokes, but she can't get out the words that will save her, because they will simultaneously damn Marin. "I, um …"

"I can get you out of here, Addie," Mark says, stepping forward and grasping her hands, apparently her predicament is obvious, or perhaps he can simply still read her like an open book. "We can leave right now, go anywhere you want, anywhere away from here. And I can protect you, I can -"

"No, Mark," she whispers, and the words are so hard to say, because the illusion he has painted, a fairytale escape from her pain, but she can't leave without her child and can't tell Mark until she is sure he will behave in a way that won't endanger her (the Sloan's are passionate people, but Jack is the master puppeteer in this situation).

Mark looks like she's slapped him and all these feelings, like little slivers of glass in her heart, become too much to bear. She pulls away, flees outside and into the pouring rain, watches as ocean water and fresh water mix, pounding into the vulnerable sand (she knows how the sand feels, she thinks). Droplets oozing from the clouds soak her, drowning her strawberry curls and making her light cashmere wrap translucent, but not even the downpour can rid her of shame, of fear, of pain, of longing for Mark.

Sliding glass is wretched open behind her, footsteps of expensive shoes echo, and she knows it's him, ready to play out the next scene in their heartrending fairytale.

"Addie …"

"I can't leave."

"Listen to me, Addison. What we did to Derek, it was wrong, but this … you don't deserve this. You can't stay here, you can't be hurt, you just … can't. He could kill you and I … I can't live knowing you're in danger."

"I can't go with you, Mark."

"He doesn't deserve you."

"I'm not in love with him."

Mark runs a hand through his hair, ruffling the grey-blonde strands, a classic frustrated move for him, and Addison's eyes can't help but trace the flawless plains of his muscles underneath the thin charcoal t-shirt. "Then why?" he demands and she hears the crack in his voice as he tries to fight back tears.

"I – it isn't something I can just explain," she says desperately. "I would kind of have to … show you, and I can't do that right now because …"

Mark is frowning thunderously, and, misinterpreting his anger, Addison falls silent. These days, whenever she witnesses marital fights, or fights at all, she can hardly keep from cringing and often needs to make sidetrips to the bathroom to try and breathe. "Please," he breathes, reaching out to pull the thin sweater from her shoulders, so her bruised arms and shoulders are visible. "Please, Addison." The straps of her tank top and bra fall down her arms, urged on by his palms, until she is standing in the rain almost bare-chested as Mark evaluates the damage done to her body at the hands of her husband.

The only time she has ever seen Mark Sloan cry is when she told him she aborted their baby, and seeing tears in glacier-hued eyes now nearly undoes her, knowing that Marin is alive and well, for the time being, at least, somewhere in a twenty-mile radius.

He bends and presses dry, cracked lips to the dip in her collarbone, over dusky pink skin dyed sickly yellow by a week old bruise. She gasps a little as he moves lower, kissing a bruise on the swell of her breast and then her shoulder, her neck, her back. "Come with me," he pleads. "I'll do anything, Addie. I'll never hurt you again."

"I can't," she sobs. "I can't, Mark, because he has -" the words intending to reveal her daughter die as a jangle of keys is heard in the direction of the front door. Quickly, Addison pushes Mark away, adjusts her clothes, and steps toward her back door, Mark close behind.

"You have to go," she hisses.

"No. I won't leave you."

"Mark, go."

"No."

"Go," she pleads with such raw pain in his voice that he can't bear to cause any more and wrenches himself away, hurrying down the porch steps in the pounding rain and into the sand. He forces himself to walk toward his rental car, hating himself as he does, but angry at her as well, for not being strong enough to leave.

He fails to notice the two-year-old, still in pink triceratops pajamas, watching him through the glass of the front door, breath condensing around her perfect cherry lips as a fight commences behind her.

*'*''*''*'*

She knows it is coming but is unable to quench her dread nor act to conceal the evidence of a day not spent in a manner Jack would approve of. The usual cry of, "Addison!" is heard from the entryway along with the pitter-patter of Marin's feet, but her frozen limbs don't react in time to hide the water-dampened lilies resting on the kitchen counter, her brain can't connect neurons quickly enough to conjure up an explanation for the state of her clothes.

"You're home early?" Jack asks as he discards the jacket of his Armani suit on the nearest barstool and stretches his toned body. Marin has already been dropped from his arms but is occupied down the hall with a ladybug that fluttered in along with them.

"I didn't feel very well at work, so I took part of the day off," Addison explains dully. Jack's eyes finally graze over her figure and notice the rivulets of water enveloping her skin, and as he steps closer he stumbles over one of Marin's toys left under the counter and grabs at the counter for support. His fingers instead meet the crinkly bouquet of flowers.

"What the … what is this?" he demands angrily as he seizes them, searching for a card or any other source of identification regarding the sender. Inhaling sharply, Addison prepares herself for what is coming, checking that Marin is unaware, now engaged with something she spotted outside the window. "And why the hell are you all wet?"

"Don't yell," Addison beseeches softly. "I stopped by the store to pick up some Tums and thought they looked nice …"

"And you're wet because …?" Jack prompts in his court voice, so she can't tell whether he believes her or not.

"Well, it started raining and -"

"Honestly, Addison," Jack chuckles. "I deal with lying, cheating criminals every day. Compared to them, you can't lie worth shit. Where were you today?"

"I was here, I told you, I -"

Swiftly, Jack spins on one heels and stalks toward the front door, where Marin has allowed the ladybug to crawl from her finger and to escape in the carpet upon discovering its rank smell. She yelps when Jack lifts her and struggles as her stormy ocean eyes produce desperate tears. Jack places her unceremoniously in the downstairs bathroom, locks the door from the inside (which he knows very well she can't reach) and shuts it, leaving the toddler trapped before he rounds on Addison.

"Who brought you the flowers?" he growls. "Are you cheating on me? Because you and I are both familiar with the whorish tendencies that landed you here in the first place."

"Why would you care if I was cheating on you?" Addison snorts derisively. "You fuck the brains out of some new bimbo each week and you make sure I know it -" Her words are silenced by his slap, the humiliation of which stings more than the actual pain.

Heart pumping double time, Addison attempts to step around Jack to assist Marin, who is banging on the door and sobbing. His hands grip her wrist before she moves even one step and he forces her against the wall, trapping her there with his much larger body.

For one wild, confusing instant, when his finger meets her lips softly, she almost believes he is going to kiss her. "You kissed him," Jack says as he traces the outline of her swollen mouth with the tip of his index finger, and she supposes he knows what she looks like after she's been kissed, especially since Mark has never been exactly subtle (at least he didn't give her a hickey. This time).

"What else did you do?" her husband hisses with deceptive reserve. "Did you touch him? Did you let him touch you?"

"No," Addison breathes.

"Then why the hell," Jack inquires, "are your clothes askew? You always have to look perfect, and right now, you look far from perfect."

She doesn't answer.

"Did you have sex with him?"

"No."

"I asked," he roughly places his hands on her hips and spins are around, so the zipper of her skirt is visible, "did you have sex with him?" Violently, Jack pulls the zipper of the designer pencil skirt down, so it is loose around her hips, and makes her face him again.

"Last chance."

"I didn't, I swear, I -"

"Too bad I don't believe you," Jack sighs. Then he forces his hand between her silky skin and the material of her skirt, causing her to gasp and squirm. Ignoring her discomfort, he pushes his fingers inside her panties, where he proceeds to grope harshly around, testing the wetness in-between her legs to try and prove her infidelity and determine whether she recently had sex or not.

Tears spring into her eyes as he is intentionally inconsiderate, disgrace burns through her veins. Although Jack has never raped her, he still shoves his extramarital affairs in her face and treats her body like a ragdoll created to do his will, as if she wasn't even human. Finally, he withdraws and she collapses against the wall, mauling her lip with her teeth to keep from sobbing as he walks away as if nothing happened. Her innocence means next to nothing to him, simply that he has nothing to punish her for and can move on to other activities.

Shivering, she stands and crosses over to the door behind which her daughter is stuck, trying to ignore the ghostly imprints of two sets of fingers on her body; one set warm, gentle, caressing, hinting at the pleasure they could bring, the other cold, foreboding, taking little bits of life with them as they disconnect.

*'*''*''*'*

_Jack looks around, interested, as he finally pulls up to her beachside home. It is nice, a wonderful place to raise a child, although doesn't betray the depth of the wealth he knows, after tonight, she possesses. But her money doesn't mean much to him – he has his own, both from inheritance and what he has earned being a top-rate attorney._

_His experience with pregnant women is limited, except for the one case when he argued against a woman who strangled her husband because he refused to adhere to her cravings, and as she was hardly the norm, he observes Addison as she steps from his car, pulling a patterned wrap tighter around her dress-clad body. There is no obvious indication that she is pregnant, no telltale bump or effervescent glow, but something else, a quality he cannot identify, that assures him of the truth of her words._

_Finding out that Vivi – Addison was pregnant was a shock, but after a few seconds of disbelief, he realized a better opportunity couldn't have been gifted to him on a silver platter. Not only was the baby an opportunity to gain her trust, it was also, later on, a pawn with which to control her. Pleased, he accompanies her to her door, and then inside when she invites him._

"_Should I close it?" he asks as he steps inside. "Or was that not an invitation for an extended stay?"_

"_I have an early surgery," she says, tossing a grin, Vivian's grin, over her shoulder sultrily and allowing the turquoise waterfall of fabric to ripple over her body. "Rain check?"_

"_As long as you're not trying to get rid of me," he jokes charmingly as she disappears further into her house. _

"_Of course not. I'll just get that book for you," she promises, leaving behind only an imprint of fiery red hair in his brain. Jack walks farther into the house, trying to picture a baby amongst all her perfect, beige and cream furniture. He can't quite see it, but the illusion of one snuggled up to her shoulder manifests only too easily._

_The baby is better news than he ever expected, the key to her undoing, he is sure. Addison will not be easy to manipulate, but a child will give him the upper hand he never had with Vivian, the control he grew to crave. Jack smiles as he traces a finger over the granite of her counter, brushing a few crumbs to the floor._

_His eyes fall on her mail. There are a few bills, a postcard, a couple of catalogs, and, on top, a medical journal and a letter, a personal letter, written by an obviously male hand. She's already having someone else's baby; he doesn't need any other claims on her. Jack flips open the journal, barely glancing at the dreamy neurosurgeon on the front, and places the letter inside it, so he can pretend to be reading should she come down._

_Then he opens the letter._

"_Dear Addie,_

_I've never really been good at writing letters. The last time I wrote one was in fourth grade, when our class had to write to our senator telling him how he could improve things such as the environment or school or whatever. I asked him to put soda in fountains instead of water. I don't know about you, but last time I drank out of one of those germ-infested things, it definitely wasn't Coke coming out. So as far as letters go, I'm not an expert._

_Derek would probably have some perfect prince charming way of saying this, but that's not who I am and you know that, so I'm just going to say it. I made a mistake, Addie. I screwed up. I never should've –"_

_Luckily her heels can be heard a mile away, and he manages to get the letter in the trash and under an orange peel before she arrives into the kitchen. She laughs merrily when she sees him with the medical journal open on his lap and tells him he can keep it before handing over a well-worn copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns, the book she had quoted as one of her favorites at dinner. He won't read it, but she will think they have similar interests._

_She's really glowing now, under the soft porch light, beautiful, and his, and he can't help himself. He presses his lips to hers and she quickly reciprocates, throwing her arms around his shoulders and teasing his mouth open with her tongue. Jack sweeps his tongue quickly over her lips, barely dipping inside before pulling away to leave her out of breath against the front door._

_As he leaves, he knows he has her._

*'*''*''*'*

**Soo ... what did you think? Mark knows about Addison, but not about Marin. Next chapter is the three of them, Jack included, figuring out their next moves. I promise Mark will be back fairly soon (as Addie's knight in shining whatever) but you can predict what will happen in the mean time ... :D**


	5. Wondering

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
__Wondering_

**Well, I think that was a little faster than last time. Slightly. Maybe. I'm not completely satisfied with this chapter, but I'm afraid if I rewrite it it will never get finished, so here it is. I'm exhausted so please forgive any mistakes. Also, I really enjoy your comments, so tell me what you think at the end.**

*'*''*''*'*

_She had known all along, ever since Violet and Naomi pushed and prodded her into that bathroom with their drugstore bags full of home pregnancy tests, that eventually the whirlwind fairytale of a growing baby and a new love would be overshadowed by the insidious past. She put this off, reminding herself that there was no guarantee she would bring this baby to term, but now she's three months and the risk of miscarriage has decreased dramatically and because she promised herself that she would grow up and do this the right way, it's time._

_The fuzzy blanket, resemblant of a sheep prior to shearing, hides the slight roundness her belly has taken on. Although clearly visible in the tight, jungle green tank top she donned that morning, the most swollen part of her abdomen is only bigger by about the width of a ping-pong ball. Still, she loves resting her hand over the practically nonexistent bump, imaging the baby inside, floating in amniotic fluid, already able to move and flex willowy, barely-there limbs._

_Addison was immediately excited for this pregnancy, already swayed by the heady force of maternal love, but for every smile she awards her stretching, encompassing skin there is an equal twinge of guilt. Mark was excited the first time, and not only because he wanted to trump Derek, the golden boy, but because maybe he woke up sweating from perfect dreams of white picket fences once in a while, just as she does. It's a pretty picture that, if dangled in their face, few can refuse, even if they have previously eschewed it._

_Sighing, Addison lifts the phone she has cradled in her lap and dials that too-familiar number, the one that every time she thinks it is erased from her head, she finds the need to call it and discovers it isn't. Mark wanted their first baby. Mark wanted Sloane's child. And if he wants this child, who is she to refuse, he provided half of its chromosomes and possibly donated his wicked smirk, those frost-colored eyes, and the irresistibility that somehow gets her every time._

_After the fifth monotone ring, she suspects he is either not home or unwilling to answer, but just as she's about to hang up, a voice answers the phone._

_Not the deep, grating, but somehow still gentle tones she was hoping to hear, however, instead Lexie's high, sugar sweet greeting reaches her ears. "Hello?"_

"_Is Mark there?" Addison sighs, hoping she has not interrupted something, which would be humiliating on so many levels._

"_Nope! He's at the hospital. Can I take a message?" the resident chirps, and Addison rolls her eyes, clearly the young doctor hadn't figured out who she was._

"_Is he going to be back any time soon?" Addison persists._

"_No. May I ask who's calling?" Lexie's voice has turned hesitant._

_Addison sighs again, ponders hanging up, but, she realizes, it just might be better this way. If Mark truly doesn't want her, or this … he has an out. "Addison Montgomery," she speaks haughtily into the phone, and by the sound of it, Lexie takes the news of her call worse than her sister took the news of her being married to McDreamy, as there is the sound of breaking glass._

"_U-uh," Lexie stutters. "Umm … hi."_

_She doesn't dignify the other woman's mumbling with a response, instead, she gets to the point (Meredith's inability to do so always amused her, but with Lexie it's just annoying.). "I have something to tell Mark, something big that involves him. If he … wants to know, tell him to call back, but if he doesn't, well," she smiles ruefully, "I understand, and I won't call again."_

"_Uh, okay," Lexie squeaks. "I'll let him know. When he gets back, that is."_

"_All right. Thank you, Dr. Grey," Addison says crisply, and then hangs up before the mousy woman-child can remind her any less of someone Mark would want to spend his life with. Now all there is left to do is wait._

_As she runs a bath, letting jets of water stream down into the drain, wasted like the love she and Mark had once shared, not once does it enter her mind that Lexie might have lied. She balances a bowl of cookies 'n cream ice on the slight bump of her stomach amongst mounds of bubbles as steam rises around her, and waits. How long is his shift? Will Lexie tell him right away, or not until the next day or even the next month? Will he call right away, or take time to think it over? She thinks the old Mark would have been dialing before Lexie even finished her sentence, but she doesn't know this new Mark as well as she knew the old one._

*'*''*''*'*

Meredith sits swinging under emerging stars as she watches the few twilight-hued specks diffuse amongst the much darker ones of night. It's the perfect temperature, not hot enough to cause the sticky, uncomfortable sweat of summer but not cold enough that the humid air takes on a frosty chill. Her feet hit the deck as she rocks, toes brushing against foliage bearing drops slowly condensing from gas particles conglomerate drops of water, and then, if it's cold enough, hardening into perfect crystals of ice.

Pregnancy makes her feel more calm and at peace than she would have ever previously believed possible. Once upon a time the notion of dependency and stability was frightening, but now she welcomes it, knowing that her two boys will also be with her, even if her son will not always be inside her and Derek still gets home late some nights from the hospital. She can hear him inside, though, and never did she dream that putting dishes into the dishwasher could seem a melodious kind of lullaby.

Her hand pauses on the apex of her stomach, however, when she hears a car in the driveway. They are still living in her mother's house, at least until the one on their land is completed, so within a few seconds she can make out luminescent dots in the declining distance. These headlights are distinctive, and she puzzles over who would be arriving in a Porsche at eleven o'clock at night until she recognizes the midnight blue tint of the vehicle as Mark comes to a rather sudden stop.

Her husband's best friend bounds up the stairs in a few seconds and she gleans only a single instant of tortured ice blue before Mark begins pounding on the front door. He doesn't even see her until she's silhouetted by the porch light, hand resting on the waffle pattern of one of Derek's thermies. "Grey," he breathes shortly, just as Derek pulls the door open.

"Mark!" he exclaims, partially in surprise, but mostly, she's sure, in delight, because her husband is in jeans and an undershirt and she notes with a slight pang of jealousy that that's an amber beer in one hand. "What's up, you want a -"

"No," Mark counters harshly, and even though he's just _Mark_, Mark who trapped spiders in jars and released them outside despite her and Lexie's disgust, she's startled. He's almost menacing and Meredith is reminded that he's more than six feet tall and has the muscles to go with it, she certainly doesn't envy whoever has caused this sudden rage. "She – she …"

He chokes over his own words, like they're excreting poison and Meredith exchanges a concerned glance with Derek as he shepherds his best friend into their house. "Shep, she –" Mark begins again before Derek forces him down onto their couch.

"Breathe," Derek commands, except now he's not Derek, he's Dr. Shepherd because something is seriously wrong with Mark. "What happened? Is it Teddy … Lexie?" Meredith's heart constricts and she curses her pregnancy hormones for the umpteenth time. There's nothing to cry about yet, and yet the sense that warned her of the bomb and the ferry accident is screaming at her.

Mark shakes his head violently, stormy eyes wide in a face that is suddenly boyish in its helplessness. "Addison," he finally croaks, and Meredith smiles wryly, it always comes back to this.

"You saw her in LA?" Derek questions curiously. Nobody except a distraught Callie and a worried Arizona knew the reason for Mark's abrupt departure to the city of golden beaches and picturesque skies, but Addison … Addison could explain nearly anything in regards to Mark's actions.

"She …"

"She what, Mark?" Meredith prompts. Mark knew Addison was married; the wedding invitation was the last she and Derek (and apparently anyone) had seen or heard from her. She'd gotten food poisoning from a seafood place that Mark, ironically enough, had recommended in LA, so her memories of Addison's second wedding to Jack Something-She-Can't-Remember are rather hazy. Mark hadn't gone to the wedding at all.

"He's hitting her."

Mark's slate eyes are glassy with tears, but it still takes a moment-contained eon for the whispered confession to sink in. She wants to disbelieve it as her stomach twists uncomfortably with nausea, but he's nearly crying and Mark Sloan doesn't cry.

They've seen victims of abuse in the hospital innumerable times; they're the cases everyone tries to avoid. The collision of compassion and consternation aside, the situations are almost always impossibly heartbreaking, but she just can't see _Addison _as one of those women, covered in bruises long sleeves and concealer can't completely hide.

"W-what?" Derek stutters. "What are you talking about?" he demands of Mark, as if he must have heard wrong.

"He's hitting her and I saw the bruises and the scars and she won't fucking leave. I tried everything in the world but she won't," Mark's fist hits the coffee table, "fucking," he stands abruptly, "leave," Derek's grandmother's expensive glass vase hits the ground and shatters.

It's cliché, but she never realized silence could be so loud.

"Mark," Derek says loudly. "Mark!" When the plastic surgeon remains unresponsive, Derek pushes his muscled form back onto their couch where Mark sits like a small child, catatonic in his fear. "Mark, listen to me," Derek beseeches, and when the handsome face opposite him becomes overrun with precipitation, Meredith pads into the kitchen in order to give the two brothers some privacy.

One bowl of Cherry Garcia ice cream later, however, it doesn't sound as though her husband has made much progress, so Meredith refills her bowl along with another and heads back into the cozy living room. Mark accepts the bowl with shaking fingers, and she's relieved to see his face appears dry, although his eyes are rather bloodshot.

"The ice cream isn't poisonous, you know," Meredith jokes. "I may be pregnant, but I do enjoy normal food once in a while." The spoon she supplied for him screeches around the edge of the ceramic bowl, but Mark still seems unable to eat.

"Look, Mark," Derek says finally. "I knew Addison for thirteen years before we got a divorce. You learn things about people when you're married to them, things they can't directly tell you, but things you automatically learn. She's strong, Mark, and I can't see her staying in an abusive relationship for anything – not unless it will somehow help someone."

"How can her getting beat up every other day help anyone?" Mark shouts. "I don't care how well you fucking knew her, Shep, but -"

"Listen to me," Derek commands softly. "I think there's something we're missing, some piece of the puzzle we don't know. It isn't … the same for me anymore, but it's killing me that this is happening to Addie too. I may not be in love with her anymore, but I do still care about her and always will."

"Tell us what happened, Mark," Meredith implores. "I may be married and pregnant, but I'll always be dark and twisty inside."

"I didn't go to the conference," Mark states dully. "Callie was worried about her, she hadn't RSVP'd to the wedding and she was freaking out, so … I agreed to go check on her. I took a taxi to her house and she was there. It was the middle of the day, and she was there." Mark inhales sharply before continuing. "She never got my letter," he states finally. "She never saw it. And she called, but Lexie never told me."

Meredith and Derek exchange a confused glance, as they were never aware of any letter, but Meredith figures interrupting Mark at this point is unwise, he needs to say these torturing, venomous things more than her and Derek need to hear them.

"She was so sad, and … I kissed her," Mark continues. "I didn't know what he was doing yet, but she was married again and I kissed her. She's like … heroin or something," he sighs.

"You kissed her, and …" Derek trails off, clearly anticipating where such activities ended up.

"She was crying. It washed the make-up away and there was a huge bruise on her right cheek. I asked her about it, and she freaked out. I told her she could come with me, get away from him. She ran outside, it was raining, and … there were bruises everywhere," Mark whispers brokenly. "_Everywhere_. There was something she needed to tell me, but then he came home and she made me leave and I took the next flight back but once I got here I didn't know where to go. If I go back to the apartment, Callie will interrogate me, and she can't know. If she goes down there, and you know she will, Addie could get hurt even worse."

"Do you have any idea what she was going to tell you?" Derek inquires quietly.

"I, uh …well, I was going to tell her that I loved her, and I assumed she was gonna say the same thing," Mark mutters as his cheeks turn pink, and despite the gravity of the situation, Meredith bites her lips to keep from smiling, because Mark in love is adorable.

"Something's keeping her there," Derek states, a world away in swirling thoughts that neither she nor Mark can make sense of, a kind of logic unique to Derek, an integral part of his compassion as a doctor. He hesitates. "Mark, did she … could she have had a kid with him?"

Mark's shrug, to someone who did not know him, might have just appeared a jerky, uncaring reaction, but Meredith has known him since this mess started and can see the pain in Mark's movement, the unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility Derek had proposed, the way he winces, as if a fellow doctor had maliciously decided to stab him with a scalpel. She glances again at Derek, but his eyes are trained on Mark as he watches the other man grapple with the feasible circumstances.

"I didn't see any kid stuff," he says finally. "The house looked just the same as it did last -"

"That doesn't mean anything though," Derek counters. "The kid could have been with her husband, or upstairs sleeping." Mark offers no further comment, but the idea of Addison's abusive husband with a little slice of her, something she had taken away from him, seems to be torturing him, burning with unwelcome visions through his veins.

"What do I do?" he growls finally. "What the fuck am I supposed to do, Shep? Leave her there? Pretend I don't know what's going on? If something happens to her, if he … if he ki – hurts her, it'll be my fault because I knew and I didn't do anything about it!" An arm composed of sinewy muscle connects with the wall, accompanied by a dull, painful thud.

"Right now?" Derek sighs. "You wait. You let her think. You go to work and you do your job and you save people. You call to check on her, but you don't dwell on it every second of every day. And in a month, if you want to go back, I can give you time off."

"A month?" Mark snarls. "I have to live with this for a month? Fuck that, I'm -"

"Don't," Derek instructs harshly. "Don't be rash. You can't make this decision for her."

"I can't," Mark admits slowly. "But _we _could."

"What?"

"Come with me. We – you and me, we know her better than anyone. We could call the police, we could call Archer; she'd _listen _to us, Derek!" Mark's breathing increases as he leans forward, fervency hanging on to every word. "You owe her this much, after everything that's happened, you owe her."

Derek slumps, the inky depths of eyes like mini galaxies troubled as he weighs his culpability in events long passed. When they rest on her, she nods subtly, not to give permission, but to communicate to him that she's okay with it. Her and Addison were never friends but she likes to think in a sideways world they could have been.

"Okay," he finally says. "Richard can take over being chief for a few days. Although I don't know if I'll ever get it back again," he murmurs under his breath. "But you're right. We were all best friends, and … she would do the same for either of us."

"Thank, Shep," Mark mutters, and before Meredith can blink, he's out their front door and into the darkening dusk, leaving only the ripples of a shocking secret behind.

*'*''*''*'*

The wet roads dissolve under the slick wheels of his Porsche and he tries to allow the rumbling of the engine to calm his raging anger in preparation for what he must do. He is going to lie to one of his closest friends, the person who, unlike Derek, looked at him after Addison left for LA and understood. Callie cannot know, Arizona cannot know, no one must know except for him and Derek, who will help him, and Meredith, his trusty dirty ex-mistress who will keep his secret. He won't do anything that will endanger Addison, not unless he's sure he can save her.

Pulling up to his apartment, he acknowledges, in his kind of talking-to-God-yet-not-praying-way, that some miracle had kept his preoccupied mind from causing an accident in the last twelve miles. He would never acknowledge to another living soul that he believes in any of that, but sometimes it's nice to imagine something after all this angst, although his chances of getting into Hell are about the same as those of getting into Heaven.

"You better keep her safe," he murmurs into the cool, winter-touched air inside his car before stepping out and onto the moist pavement, which still excretes the smell of rain.

On the plane he had decided to avoid Callie until the next day, if possible, so he would have a better chance of keeping his emotions in check, but he has hardly inserted his key into the lock before the athwart door swings open to release an anxious Callie, resorted to a strand of obsidian hair, and Arizona, looking politely inquisitive. He and the latter woman have an interesting relationship that stays amicable as long as their time with Callie is in equilibrium. Cristina, eight months pregnant, huge, and cranky, appears behind them, Owen all the while trying to persuade her to sit back down.

The sweet oblivion of sleep will have to wait, he concedes as he is herded into the apartment, led to a barstool, and practically force fed the stir fry Owen cooked up. He eats it too hot, letting it burn his tongue, because he is wary of speaking and a full mouth is a valid excuse. It dilapidates a bit of the pain tugging at his heart, replaces figurative heartache with physical pain, and the distraction is welcomed.

Callie abducts his plate before too long, however, and begins to interrogate him about Addison.

And he looks into those trusting, deep brown eyes, like melted chocolate, and lies. "She's fine."

"Fine?" Callie echoes. "Fine? That's all you got out of a two day trip is that she's fine?"

"No," Mark backpedals quickly, and Cristina snickers at his wary expression. "She's just been busy with the practice and her … her husband and everything," the word husband almost refuses to leave his lips, and Callie, misunderstanding, flashes him a knowing, sympathetic look.

"And …" Callie prompts.

"And, yeah," Mark finishes lamely. "Lots going on down there."

"She means is Addison coming," Arizona supplies helpfully, "to the wedding."

"Oh. Uh …" Too late, Mark realizes he never said a word about the wedding. Sure, he mentioned Callie, but somehow their warped history took precedence over any promises he made to the Latina woman. As her eyes narrow, however, Mark lies quickly, determined that when he next tries for her, in a month, he will succeed, meaning she will be here in time for the wedding. "Yeah. She's coming. Sorry. I just …"

"Were too busy screwing Satan to mention it to her?" Cristina sneers.

"Cristina! She's married!" Callie admonishes the other woman quickly before rounding on Mark. "Oh God. You didn't, did you? MARK!" she yells while Cristina cackles evilly.

"No, we didn't … we kissed," he confesses over Callie's glare, which threatens to break every bone in his body if he doesn't comply with the truth.

"El cielo te ayudará, Mark," she sighs in exasperation.

"Once a manwhore, always a manwhore," Cristina chimes in.

"Shut up, preggo," Callie retorts, although with no real heat behind her words.

"Being pregnant actually sucks," Cristina seizes another opportunity to whine about her condition, and Mark tunes her out. He'd do anything for a child, and while he knows Cristina loves her baby, albeit in a less obvious way than most people, to hear her eschew her pregnant form frustrates him, because he never saw Addie like that and he should have. Even Meredith is showing slight signs of carrying a child, although her complaints of morning sickness are more warranted.

"Owen thinks I should go on _maternity leave_," the cardiothoracic resident continues. "I mean, hello? I'm a surgeon, not McMommy. He's just McProtective."

"Uh, sitting right here," Owen interjects. This rouses an argument, which Callie engages in and Arizona attempts to mediate, and he's grateful, because they don't notice he's gone, even when the door latches softly behind him.

*'*''*''*'*

"Mama, you not lisning!" Marin calls angrily from the other side of the room. The toddler is dressed in a turquoise dinosaur costume of her own choosing, which is complete with a stuffed tail that inhibits the child's leaps, and carrying crushed French fries in one fist, with a glittery wand in the other.

"Sorry, sweetie," Addison apologizes, looking up quickly from where she is trying to suture her own knee. The sight is wiped all over with the butterscotch liquid iodine, and she has managed to stem the bleeding as well as get a needle threaded at the same time, which isn't an easy task when simultaneously trying to entertain an energetic two-year-old.

This time, her knee collided with the glass coffee table on their back patio, and while she knows this scar will be messy – ugly, in fact, compared to Mark's precise work (he'd once stitched up the side of her head as residents when an overzealous intern ran her over with a supply cart), it's really her only option.

"Can you show Mommy again?" she encourages Marin, whose strawberry lips are engaged in a pout and arms are crossed over her chest, making her look like a petulant stegosaurus. "Come on."

"Si de co tu lan, fa be wa su kan, ve de va de la … uh," the two-year-old sings, resuming her floppy dance around the floor and promptly forgetting it halfway through. While the child is distracted, face screwed up in concentration, Addison inhales sharply and plunges the sterilized needle into her peach skin, wincing as it stings and throbs. She works quickly, hoping Marin won't notice her motions, which are partially covered by the eggshell comforter.

"Addison!" comes the shout from downstairs and she jumps, accidentally stabbing herself with the needle farther up her thigh.

"Shit," she swears reflexively, wiping up the drop of blood before it can reach her white panties quickly.

"Sthit!" Marin repeats from the other side of the room, pearly grin on display, strawberry blonde curls framing her beaming face, chubby, angelic cheeks and sweeping nose. "Sthit!"

"No, no, don't say that," Addison moans desperately, for fear she'll get thrown out of daycare.

"Addison!" Jack is just down the hall now. She breaks the thread, slaps a large bandaid over the site quickly. He stops in the door, hair perfectly combed, a little long in the back, smelling of aftershave and cologne. She knows where he's going. "I have to leave for a while," he explains tersely. "Last minute thing on a case … anyway …"

He grabs her upper arm, not roughly, but with enough force to pull her from the bed, and leads her into the small bathroom that is adjoined to the bedroom. Her knee gives a particularly painful throb as she walks, or really, is dragged by her husband, and her stomach knots with dread.

He shoves her and she stumbles, gaining her footing just as he returns with Marin, who doesn't look disturbed by the brief ride, only upset that she was not allowed to dinosaur-hop the way herself. Jack drops the small girl into her arms, where Marin clings like a spider monkey, and slams the door as Addison steps forward.

There is a swoop and a click, and the heavy door is locked. She almost laughs at the irony of having a bathroom door that locks from the outside, and remembers the faces of the Lowe's workers when Jack requested to have it installed. It isn't funny for very long, though.

"Mama, hungwey!" Marin announces, bouncing to emphasize her point.

"Sorry, baby girl," she whispers. "We're going to have to wait a while for dinner."

She doesn't have pleasant memories of this bathroom. Jack had long ago removed anything that would allow her to break down the door, and when he has no other option but to leave her and Marin alone in the house, he always ensures that the door is secured. One weekend that Jack was forced to fly to San Francisco and Marin was not even two, they stayed in there for two entire days, with plenty of water but not enough food.

"Willw you teh me a stowey?" the child begs two hours later, when they are curled together against the bathtub, Marin's head pressed against her collarbone, the hot breath leaving her daughter's perfect lips as she breathes, ruffling the dip of the light, flowy lounge shirt Addison is clothed in.

"Once up on a time there was a little girl. She was the most beautiful in all the land, but an evil dragon kept her locked in a tower," Addison says softly as she strokes soft, silky waves. "The little girl was brave, though, and she waited and waited until one day, a handsome prince came to rescue her."

"Dada!"

"He sweeps her off her feet away from the castle, and she and the mommy and daddy live happily ever after."

"I teh you stowey?"

"Sure."

"Dez a dwinosor, an 'nother dwinosor, an 'nother dwinosor an 'nother dwinosor, an 'nother dwinosor, an one iz ywellow, an one iz geen, an one iz purble, an one iz ornunge, an gess whwere dey goin', Mama?" Marin plows on without waiting for Addison's answer. "Dey iz goin' to stwore to fwind frigatator." The little girl yawns, curling closer to her mother, and afterward her speech is unintelligible as she drifts off to sleep.

And she can see her at kindergarten, terrified when a teacher leads her to the bathroom, and she can see her playing in the schoolyard, the teachers whispering about bruises left bare by her light summer dress. She can see her in middle school, fragile self-esteem destroyed by Jack, and in high school, when her husband begins punish her rebellion the same way he does her mother's.

Her eyes blur over with tears, warm and wet, as she contemplates the bleak future. Addison became not addicted, but accustomed to control after leaving her parent's house. She had power over her appearance, her interns and residents at the hospital, her O.R. When Derek's absences began to flavor their marriage, she took control again, sleeping with her secret vice in order to prove that nobody, not even her husband, could determine the direction her life took.

Now she is powerless to protect the only thing she has ever truly treasured.

She needs to leave, before the future she imagined becomes reality.

She needs to get out of here.

She needs help.

Her mind goes to Mark.

But how?

She can still feel the ghost of his kiss upon her lips.

*'*''*''*'*

**Kudos to those who picked up on the Lost reference. I don't think I have any specific spoilers for next chapter, but if you review and ask me a question, I might be able to answer it :)**


	6. Lingering

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
__Lingering_

**I have a lot to do so this is the quickest author's note ever. Enjoy, and please tell me what you think at the end =D. Sorry in advance for the cliffy.**

*'*''*''*'*

A month. Thirty days, give or take. In a month, the moon waxes and wanes, showing off glimmering white facets until it hides, a butterfly in its chrysalis, and darkness precludes the beginning of a new cycle. In the absence of a fertilized egg, a woman's body resets, preparing for the next opportunity for new life. Relationships form and break, teeth are lost and love is found, laws are signed, structures built, earthquakes weathered, conflicts began.

A lot can happen, in a month.

And a lot did, in _that _almost-month.

*'*''*''*'*

She dreams endlessly of the cool aqua waves that lap around the perimeter of her house, about how they would feel crashing against her sweaty skin, licking at the drips that are falling down the back of her neck, dampening the loose, raspberry colored smock-shirt that has failed in its purpose to keep her cool.

Addison worries a little for the toddler in the stroller in front of her because the heat is certainly not friends with Marin's heart – in fact the two battle to seep away her residual strength until she gasps for breath and her fingertips turn blue and Addison's heart seizes up in her chest like a single organ can have epilepsy. They've been lucky, these two and a bit short years of life, but she can she what lingers on the horizon, waiting with monitors and tubes and slick, blood colored scalpels. This relative peace in the child's body will not last forever.

Jack walks a couple of yards behind the lavender stroller, chatting with the blonde he'd easily tempted near the front gate with his disingenuous looks and practiced charm. Today, if Addison plays the sister-in-law, she is allowed to wheel Marin around the park a little ahead of Jack and make believe that it is just the two of them, mother and daughter, enjoying a day at the zoo.

As they watch the leopard pace in his cage, all sprung tendons and razor sharp muscles, his gold-flecked eyes meet hers and she realizes she is as trapped as he is, although he by metal and she by circumstance. She doesn't have long to dwell on this before Marin squeals, "Kitty!" in her delighted two-year-old way and unknowingly dissolves her mother's musings.

"Mama, I hold?" her daughter twists around in her seat to ask, spilling cherry soda from a sippy cup topped with the panda they haven't visited yet.

"No, baby, you can't hold this kitty. He isn't Milo," she explains.

"I wahna hold! Mama, pwease?" Marin begs, bouncing in the stroller and causing her precarious pigtails to come loose.

"This isn't a kitty, Rinny, it's a leopard. You can't hold him because he's dangerous," Addison elaborates wearily as Jack and the unnamed blonde pace closer and the sun redoubles his effort to burn her alive.

"Why he sleepy?"

"Because it's hot, silly."

"I doh wahn him to be sleepy," Marin giggles, reaching for the glass, and although her fingers brush the silky mirrored surface, the leopard only blinks lazily.

"How about we visit the elephants?" Addison suggests as Jack begins sending her pointed looks, telling her wordlessly to move on so he and the girl can occupy the exibit. It makes her nauseous to see him flout their marriage so openly, so carelessly, but she's had lots of practice from Derek's similar treatment and is able to keep her emotions in check. She meanders slowly away from Jack, checking occasionally to make sure he is absorbed in the blonde, before ducking around the naked mole rats a following a ramp to the penguins.

"Dat's not a eletant!" Marin giggles as the flightless black and white birds fall like dominoes into the water, the spray catching Addison's khaki designer shorts as she quickly wheels the stroller past. "Mama stahp! Wahnt to see the gins!"

"We'll see the penguins next time, I promise," Addison murmurs urgently as she digs in her purse for her car keys. They're there, and if she can get out to the car and drive home Jack will be stranded, leaving her time to find Marin's medicine and leave for good. "We're going to go on a little trip, Rinny, to Seattle, and we can go to the zoo there. We can go everyday, if you want," she promises rashly, but her words are nonetheless true; once free from Jack she and Marin will be able to do whatever they want.

"Kay," Marin sighs around the straw of her strawberry soda and Addison breathes a sigh of relief that their abrupt departure will not cause a tantrum, although Marin's a fairly amicable kid her age isn't called the 'terrible two's' for nothing. The child relaxes in her stroller as various animals flash past but Addison's heart continues to pound against her sternum as hope takes flight, wondering if this could really be it, if they could really be free.

Jack has likely noticed her absence by now and abandoned his impromptu date and she's collecting stares now as she weaves through happy families enjoying a Saturday at the zoo, oblivious to the pain she carries, the desperation in every step. The exit is a funnel of people seeking to get out of the heat and it's tempting to lift Marin from her stroller and shoulder through, but the last thing she needs is to arouse suspicion. Finally, they arrive back at Jack's BMW sedan, Addison straps Marin into her soft floral car seat, and half-folds the stroller and throws it into the trunk before climbing into the front seat and jamming the keys into the ignition before she even has the door closed.

Marin's shriek warns her, but no sooner has she twisted to reassure the toddler than her forearm is captured roughly and her heart seeks more quickly and irrevocably than the Titanic. "Thanks for starting up the car, honey," Jack says through gritted teeth before shoving her over the consul and into the passenger seat. Tears sting her eyes as Jack pulls viciously out of the parking lot, scraping against another car's bumper but not bothering to stop and access the damage. Marin watches with wide eyes, tinted bluer than normal by anxiety and fear. Addison wants to open her mouth to comfort her but suspects such an endeavor might cause her to vomit, considering the way Jack's tendons flash under his tanned skin, letting her know what is coming once they arrive home.

*'*''*''*'*

"Oh God," he hears Callie mutter in exasperation as two pairs of heels weave through empty beer bottles and stained scrubs to reach the black leather couch upon which he is sprawled, epitomizing the word pathetic.

"Did something happen?" Arizona whispers to Callie, presumably gathering bottles like a bouquet and causing the clinking that invades his tender ears. Mark smirks sadistically into his pillow; at least Addison's latest tragedy is not something the Seattle Grace rumor mill has caught wind of.

"Not that I know of. Mark!" the Latina shouts, shaking his shoulders roughly in an attempt to rouse him. "Mark, get up."

"Bite me," he mumbles into soft fabric obscuring his face.

"Oh believe me, I will," Callie threatens, and when Arizona squeaks a protest, she adds, "and not anywhere you'll like." When this fails to inspire movement, she melts into sympathy, resting a warm hand gingerly on the back of his dirty t-shirt. "Are you okay?"

"Peachy," he snaps.

"No, really, Mark. What the hell is the matter with you? You're either at work or here passed out drunk, I haven't seen you pick up a woman in months, you're just … moping."

"Is this about Addison?" Arizona inquires gently.

"What the hell do you want?" He rolls over, t-shirt ridding up his muscled stomach, to glare at them through the frosted glass of his hangover. The alcohol can't erase the bruises, he thinks those might be permanently burned into his retinas, but it does encase her in a delicate veil, keeping her blazing, sad ocean eyes under wraps.

"We were hoping you would listen to our song mix for the wedding," Arizona requests sweetly, holding out a CD bearing the words _Callie and Zona forever _in embellished script. Mark accepts it, mostly because it is Arizona offering it to him, not Callie, and he can't think of a nice way to refuse.

"And you're the best man so you can't say no," Callie quickly interjects when he opens his mouth to protest anyway.

"Do I look like a woman to you, Torres?" he quips.

"No, but you look like a friend," Callie replies cornily. "Come on, Mark. The soundtrack has to be perfect and Meredith didn't have a reception, Cristina listens to death metal, Lexie has Kidz Bop CDs in her car, and Bailey, well, she wouldn't know good music from crap, so you're our only option.

"I think I'm going to tell her you said that."

"Don't!" Callie warns. "She'll kick my ass. It's just that the only thing she lets Tuck listen to, and hence the only thing she listens to, is baby Mozart, and no offense but -"

"Fine," he sighs, to shut her up.

"What?"

"I said fine, I'll do it."

"Oh," Callie's face brightens. "I thought it would take more convincing than that." He just stares into the distance, trying not to see Addison, sobbing in the rain, telling him she won't come with him. Callie and Arizona take the hint and leave, and for some reason, almost against his will, Mark pops the CD in the player and shuts his eyes.

And of course, Such Great Heights begins to play.

*'*''*''*'*

"_I thought dancing with the bride was supposed to be the groom's job," Mark grumbles against her petal soft, vanilla-scented skin as he swirls her around the hotel ballroom, the beads of her bodice marring the perfect moment as they create indents in his skin, reminding him that this is not _their _wedding, though it is hers._

"_Derek hates dancing," Addison breathes, one rebel strawberry strand from her up-do brushing Mark's nose as she turns to beam at her new husband. "He would only dance with me once," she pouts, and the smile disappears._

"_Well, maybe you should've thought of that before you married him," he quips bitterly. "I wouldn't let you go this whole evening, if this was our wedding."_

"_Mark, stop," she pleads. "Please don't do this. We said we weren't going to talk about it anymore."_

_He sighs and spins her, watching as snowflake chiffon and silk swirl around her in a perfect waterfall of fabric. She's lovely, lips as red as cherries against her pale cream skin, ever-changing blue green eyes outlined subtly in black, flawless neck adorned with a simple diamond necklace, and while she's in his arms he can pretend she's his._

"_Maybe I want to talk about it. Maybe I want to talk about how you chose him instead of me," Mark growls softly into the ear and experiences a short perverse pleasure as she shivers delicately, perhaps she too is remembering how he used to murmur her name in just such a voice when she lay beneath him, covered in darkness and him and nothing else._

"_I'm … I'm a marrying girl, Mark," Addison says, and he's heard this excuse so many times that he tries to tune her out, except her voice somehow still gets him. "You're you and I'm me and … Derek's the right guy, the good guy, the safe guy."_

"_You married him for safety!?"_

"_Keep your voice down," Addison chides. "It's bad enough that this is my third dance with the best man, we don't want anyone to get suspicious."_

"_Oh, because they have absolutely nothing to be suspicious _of_," he replies sarcastically and she tries to slap him but he keeps his hand firmly encased in his as he steers her around the dance floor. Instantaneously vindictive, he pulls her body closer to his until he can feel every curve, the softness of her breasts against his chest, and the scent of expensive champagne on her breath. She frowns, looking wildly around, but nobody has noticed the bride and the best man's intimate dance, the proximity, the closeness, the tension._

_Or so she thinks. But over her shoulder Mark catches the eyes of Amelia Shepherd, outlined in black and purple hair a standout even amongst the rainbow of dresses, her warning silent but perfectly clear. He loosens his hold._

_They will see us waving from such great heights …_

*'*''*''*'*

Something has been bothering him lately.

Usually these feelings, if you will, are actually quite useful. It gives him the edge he needs as a lawyer, the ability to spot a hidden secret in the shift of an eye, a bit of evidence others would miss, a method of questioning too convoluted for most others to follow. But recently the feeling has had nothing to do with any of his cases, it has, instead, more to do with Addison and the child sitting in the corner of his office, thumb in her mouth, small hand extended, as if she can touch the tops of other adjacent buildings.

Jack sighs and shuffles a couple of papers, unearthing the latest case dumped on his desk: a suspected homicide in which the perpetrator supposedly cut the victim before pushing him into a tank of sharks, who were provoked into a frenzy by the fresh, flowing blood. He tries to concentrate, tries to form an orderly system of cleverly concealed accusations, but Addison keeps invading his brain, Addison, who, although nowhere near escaping, had very nearly slipped through his fingers at the zoo.

Marin's medicine is hidden well enough that he is confident she would never be able to find it, but still, if she is ever pushed to the point where she is willing to risk the child's life in order to escape, he might not be able to stop her. Marin likely would not survive either a long drive or an airplane ride; her heartbeat is so erratic that it more resembles the rhythm of a song than the customary steady tempo and Addison knows this well. Still, he has witnessed instances of her strength, of miracles wrought by her hands, the side of her that would think, just maybe, that Marin could survive a day without the medicine.

He can't lose control now.

Jack knows Addison doesn't understand his need to continually control her, can't fathom his end objective, but the point is that there isn't one. By dictating every minute of Addison's life he can often imagine he is dictating every moment of Vivian's, paying her back in kind for what she has done to him. It brings him pleasure, after a long day of work in which he likely rocked a case, to come home to a clean house and be able to mess with Vivian's - Addison's mind, as if he's rewinding time and the crimes committed against him.

It wouldn't make sense to most, but to Jack it makes perfect sense.

There is a bang and an immediate wail from the corner of his office, and Jack exhales angrily and stands, cursing the child that has once again interrupted his concentration. He cannot leave her in daycare, like he tells Addison, because in a pinch she could possibly invent a story to get them to release the toddler to her, even if he told them not to release her to anyone but him.

The kid is clutching her forehead as large teardrops pour from stormy grey depths that he often wonders the origins of. The front of her aqua Little Mermaid dress is already damp from her crying. "Shh," Jack commands shortly, but Marin continues to wail.

"Marin! I'm trying to work!"

"Head hwuts." She has, by some inherent instinct, never called him father. He can't say he minds.

"Well, if you hit it on the glass, of course it's going to hurt," he snaps.

"Wawnt Mama! Wawnt _Mama_!"

"Shut up!"

"Mama!"

He doesn't hit her like he does her mother, aware that this will only make things worse. Besides, somewhere around her tiny, childlike body he drew the line, because she is the most innocent in this never-ending cycle of revenge and hate and love. She is a victim, like he once was, but he needs her to control Addison and nothing is going to change that. So instead he leaves his office in a whirl of aggravation and returns with a pack of Oreos from the vending machines, hoping this will placate the toddler, or at least consume her attention until she figures out how to get the cobalt package open.

He's not sure what is wrong with Addison these days, but if his intuition is even mildly in tune, he knows he will have to be watching.

And when the time comes to catch the man whose memories linger in Addison's head and whose ministrations linger on her lips, he'll be waiting.

*'*''*''*'*

Addison tries to focus on Marin, sitting at the top of the mulberry slide at the mall, hands practically attached to the side as she contemplates the soft, foamy floor below in fear. It is difficult to find a comfortable spot on the bench because one side of her hip is covered in a blotchy bruise, like plum staining on her formerly flawless ivory skin, and her back and shoulder are similarly injured. But as she shifts in an incessant, ineffective quest to find comfort, she watches her daughter fly down the slide, arms extended in evanescent joy, and is reminded why it is all worth it.

Her life in exchange for her daughter's happiness. It's a trade she's willing to make, each and every day of her life.

Meghan Freedman, Cooper and Charlotte's small blonde daughter, follows Marin down the slide, letting forth effervescent giggles, and the two toddlers end up on the ground, faces torn between laughter and tears. Lucas Wilder watches from the monkey bars as the girls try to sort out their respective limbs, but they're the same size and both dressed in pink so it isn't as easy as one might believe; from the back cornsilk and pink-tinted gold could be assumed to be sisters.

Addison can almost ignore Jack's watchful gaze, flickering between her and Marin, but can't quite manage it. He is chatting with Violet and Pete a few yards away, seemingly engrossed in the conversation, but she can see the coiled muscles under his forest green button up, the tension under his perfectly carved features.

"You okay, Montgomery?" a Southern accent suddenly drawls to her left and, startled, Addison turns to see Charlotte beside her, she didn't even notice her and Cooper had returned with ice cream. Her counterpart settles himself on the adjacent bench, likely to obtain a better view of Meghan, suddenly interested in the large, multicolored foam "rocks" that line one side of the playground.

Addison shrugs, only to have to suppress a wince. "I'm fine," she asserts firmly. "Why do you ask?"

"I may not be a world class surgeon but I'm not stupid," Charlotte snaps with something almost akin to anger.

"What is that supposed to mean?" Her voice is soft, but laced with defensive fury, as Charlotte is implying she is a liar and even though it's true, she's the best sort of liar because of her motivation.

Charlotte glances surreptitiously at Jack before replying, "I know what it's like."

Cooper, five feet away, seems focused on his Mint Chip ice cream – maybe a little too focused, and this is a secret she must keep for Marin's safety, which means ridding Charlotte of her suspicions. She's sure the St. Ambrose chief of staff would be willing to help, but nobody, save for her and possibly Jack's former girlfriends, know what he's capable of.

"You know what it's like to have a child with a heart that will likely give out in the next five years? Really?" Addison retorts sarcastically. "I wasn't aware of that."

"Enough with the games, Montgomery. You know exactly what I mean," Charlotte snaps right back. The two stare at each other, blue-green eyes revealing nothing, hazel ones a bit misty with damaging memory. "His name was Brock," Charlotte says in a softer tone. "Captain of the football team, dumb as a nail, but still the town hero. I was an idiot. Our mothers were best friends, and we were married just out of high school. I thought I knew what love was," Charlotte punctuates her anecdote with a bitter laugh. "I had no idea. It started sometime around the second year. Brock wasn't as happy working as a mechanic; he wasn't the star anymore so beer became his best friend and hitting me a close second."

Addison is silent, and Cooper is conspicuously still.

"I didn't get out of there until he died, when I was twenty-four. I was a mess, but I was young and I had my career to focus on. Jack isn't like Brock, Montgomery. Jack twice as vindictive and ten times as smart. You need to get that little one out of there before -"

"Are you telling me -"

Addison is cut off by Pete's sharp call for her; the alternative medicine guru is supporting a little girl's frail body, which is heaving for air. By the time Addison reaches her, her tiny fingertips are blue and cold and she's crying silently, unable to draw breath. "Shh," Addison chokes, clutching Marin against her chest and running a hand messily through her hair. "Did you give her the medicine?" she snaps at Jack coldly, heedless of the repercussions her tone will likely have when they're alone.

"Yeah, of course," Jack breathes from beside her, his hand on her shoulder, the picturing of a doting, supporting husband. The charade makes her sick, but she endures it as she flips Marin over and begins to massage her heart. It skips a few beats but then corrects itself, and gradually her daughter becomes once again flushed with color as her most vital organ's rhythm is restored.

They head home, Addison with the weight of Charlotte's gaze upon her. _You need to get that little one out of there before …_

*'*''*''*'*

"Mrs. Branson, your nose is broken," Mark states bluntly. "Dr. Grey here will take you up for an x-ray, and then we can determine whether surgery is required or not."

"Ob day," Mrs. Branson replies dejectedly as Lexie wheels her from the room, interns trailing behind. He's already engrossed in his next case when he feels a tap somewhere around his shoulder blade and turns to find the very resident he'd just charged with a task waiting nervously behind him. His eyes narrow.

"Dr. Grey, I believe I ordered you to get x-rays on Mrs. Branson," he states callously.

"My interns are doing that. That's what you always said they were for, right?" she laughs a little nervously. "Are you okay? Because, you know, I thought we were okay, and now you seem … I don't know. I thought maybe we could do something, even, since it's been so long and we were okay but now I'm thinking …"

"No," Mark answers brusquely.

Lexie seems confused, as if her photographic memory is only capable of remembering information, not analyzing it, much less an obvious rejection. "Or, we could just skip straight to on-call rooms," she suggests, smiling, and Mark wonders what he ever saw in that easy, foolish smile, now with a touch of attempted sensuality. "Because we're already done the getting to know you part and -"

"I wasn't going to say anything," Mark practically growls. "But now I really wanna know – how can you look me straight in the eye like that? How could you have kept a secret like that for all these years? Are you really that selfish?"

"What are you talking about?" Lexie gasps, but there is an underlying layer of guilt to her exclamation.

"Addison called," Mark says, on the verge of shouting now. "Three years ago, Addison called, and she said she needed me. You didn't tell me. You didn't say a word. She could have been sick or dying and you had no right -"

"But she's fine," Lexie argues. "She's fine, Mark, calm down. It's just that she was always between us, even though I didn't know it at first, she was always there and I just wanted it to be you and me -"

"YOU DON'T FUCKING KNOW IF SHE'S FINE!" Mark yells. "How would you know!? You don't know anything about her, she's … she's …"

"A maneater, Satan's whore. I know what happened when she first came here, I know -"

"How could -?!"

"Whoa there, buddy," Derek interrupts, wrapping his arms around Mark's chest and dragging him toward a nearby nurses' station. "Get it together. I know," he says quickly when Mark opens his mouth to begin yelling at the neurosurgeon instead of Lexie. "I know you're scared for her and I know that maybe Lexie deserved that – Addison might have never married Jack if she hadn't kept that from you. But this is a hospital, and I'm chief of surgery, and right now I need you to calm down."

Eventually, his muscled, athletic body sags and Derek forces him into a chair as the world buzzes around him. But all he can see is Addison's eyes.

*'*''*''*'*

The first thing she is aware of is the pain. Not the sunshiny giggle of the two-year-old rolling on the comforter, strawberry blonde locks splayed out like a sunset on the beige down, not the glimmers that play across her eyelids from a morning on the ocean, not the cinnamon wafts of French toast from downstairs. No, instead it is the mind-numbing ache that has settled deeply within her bones, exacerbated by the oppression she has become accustomed to.

The agony only worsens as her eyelids flutter open, and Addison lifts one hand to her right eye only to find it swollen and puffy and most likely black and blue.

Then she remembers. Jack lost a case yesterday – an important case involving a mother overworking her ten-year-old son, and she figures he most likely received criticism from both his boss and the papers. It's ironic, really. The public doesn't know what is happening in the esteemed lawyer's own home.

Jack's frustration led to a fight that included her locking the baby gate so Marin could not climb down the stairs to witness and Jack's humiliation and embarrassment morphing into a fury that engulfed her, such that her last memory was dragging herself up the steps, afraid like she was every night that Marin's heart would give out, as Jack slammed the front door on his way out to go pick up a woman, confident she would not be going anywhere in his absence.

Now she suspects her elbow may be fractured as she pulls herself into a sitting position, twisting her body so the blood is hidden from her daughter, trying to tame the mountains and castles of comforter and accompanying the effort with shrieks of laughter. A groan escapes her lips as she stands and pulls a silk dressing gown around her shoulder; it is almost impossible to get her injured left arm through it but she bites back the whimpers because islands of blue-swirled-grey are now watching her with curiosity.

"Did Jack give you your medicine, Rinny?" she asks the grinning toddler, who nods and bounces again on the bed, flattening another lump with limbs dressed in peridot pajamas with grinning inch worms.

"Mama, I's a thousfand bajillion millwion hungwey!" the little girl tells her as Addison smoothes back a tangled web of strawberry blonde locks. "A zillion twilliwion hundwed hungwey!"

"Okay, silly girl. Let's get you some breakfast!" Her smile is twisted, and slightly self-deprecating, because this child is the most beautiful thing she's ever done and yet she's been in infinitely better positions in her life to give the childhood she never had to her own kid but Marin's first three years are shaping up to be worse than her entire first eighteen. The guilt only seeps deeper as Marin launches herself into Addison's arms only to find that her mother cannot hold her on account of her injuries.

Predictably, the child pouts. "Uppy, Mama!"

Addison is still bent over the injured limb, biting her lip so hard it yields a drip of cherry red blood. "Can you walk?" she asks Marin, "Mommy doesn't feel very good."

"You no wanna hold me?"

"No, baby," she sighs, "My arm hurts. How about later?" she bargains, although she doubts a couple of hours will do much for a broken bone. Her heart tears a little more as Marin shrugs sadly and clings to her mother's right (luckily) hand instead.

The promise of soft bread laced with delectable powdered sugar overpowers the two-year-old before long, however, and she sprints ahead of Addison into the white kitchen glittering of spilled sunlight. Usually Addison cooks what Jack demands but occasionally if she's asleep or away he does it himself, so she is not immediately alarmed by the scent of food, although she'll probably have to make an abridged version for her and Marin as the last time Jack cooked for her was when her daughter was still safe inside her stomach.

What she is not prepared for, however, is the sound of a feminine shriek when the child makes it to the kitchen, nor Jack's growl of "fuck" or Marin's teary reappearance.

The woman is in her mid-twenties, with caramel colored hair, airbrushed skin, and eyes like flecks of emerald. Jack's blue and white pinstriped shirt does not come close to reaching her knees but somehow she still appears innocent, naïve, as she contemplates her one night stand's lies and attachments. She and Addison stare at each other, taking in the objects of the other's betrayal; Addison sees a glimpse of a tattoo beneath covered skin, the other woman's gaze locks on the puffy plum raccoon marking around her eye and the gold encasing her finger.

"You're married?" she snaps at Jack.

"Carly, look," he says quickly, while turning a death glare on Addison. "This isn't how it looks. It's a misunderstanding -"

But Carly is quite beside herself now, and despite Addison's automatic resentment of the woman, she sees beneath the beautiful mask to the young, distraught woman beneath it, whose fairytale prince has just come crashing down. She sees herself, and she also sees Meredith Grey, whom her initial disdain has long ago turned into almost friendship with the woman. "Remodeling the master bedroom," Carly snorts. "God, you must have thought I was an idiot! I can sleep with a girl from a bar when my wife is right down the hall -"

"Go upstairs," Jack commands Addison amongst Carly's hysterics.

"Hungwey!"

"And you have a kid too!?"

"She's not mine!" Jack retorts angrily. "She's not even mine!"

Carly, however, looks to Addison for confirmation, head cocked to the side as she blinks rapidly to obscure beautiful but tear-misted orbs. Addison nods slightly, signaling that Jack is telling the truth. Carly half-smiles, mocking herself.

"She cheated first," Jack invents suddenly, capturing Carly's attention. "This whore cheated on me and got pregnant, but I stayed with her, I stayed!" It feels like she is facing Derek's accusations all over again, except this time they are untrue. "I stayed with her and I brought up the kid but she didn't care. She still sleeps around."

The young woman's trust in Jack seems depleted, however, and when she sees Addison's eyes, full of turquoise verisimilitude, she seems to guess the truth. "I don't believe you," she whispers softly, backing away from Jack. "I thought – I don't even know what I thought anymore. But you lied, and you cheated, and you …" she trails off, staring at Addison's bruised face. "And …"

"Don't be that way, baby," Jack whines, but Carly only backs up quicker, glancing upstairs where her clothes and possessions undoubtedly lie. She seems unsure whether she should get out while she can or risk a trip upstairs to get her things.

She looks at Addison again, and Addison mouths the word 'go,' hoping the young woman will take the tennis shoes she discarded by the front door. Carly turns and scampers away, like a terrified rabbit, and Jack steps forward toward Addison, who feels dread like a writhing tangle of snakes in her belly. She wants to go back, to give Marin to Carly so she doesn't have to see this, but Carly doesn't have the medicine anymore than she does.

She stares at the sand-colored tile, watching Jack's shadow loom menacingly closer.

It all happens very fast after that.

Milo streaks out from behind the couch, a ball of orange fur, and halts at Addison's feet, hissing angrily. Before she can scoop up the ginger can and remove him from harm, however, Jack's foot connects with the small animal's side. He doesn't move after he hits the wall.

"Kitty!" Marin screams. "No!"

"Marin, listen to Mommy," Addison begs. "Go upstairs and play with your toys. Go right now, baby girl."

"Mama!" Instead of obeying, the terrified little girl wraps herself around Addison's leg, shaking too violently to even cry, to even barely speak.

"Go, Marin," Jack says coldly, but the child is frozen, flight beyond her momentary capabilities. Jack disregards her and moves to Addison instead. "You think you can fuck with me?" he shouts, grabbing her arm.

"No! Hwurt! Stahpit!"

"Rinny, please, I need you to!"

"No hwurt Mama! No -"

There is a screeching silence, a scuffle, and then a sickening thump as Marin's small body hits the wall. Like Milo, she is immediately still.

Then darkness.

*'*''*''*'*

"M-Mark?"

"Addison?"

*'*''*''*'*


	7. Reaching

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
__Reaching_

**I tried it without a note, but it just didn't look right. This was going to be up sooner but some parts just wouldn't come, and now I wrote them and I'm not so sure about them so please tell me what you think. Thanks for the reviews, btw, they really inspired this fairly quick update!**

*'*''*''*'*

"M-Mark?"

"Addison?"

She thinks she's never been more grateful to hear another voice, a reassurance that despite appearances, she is not alone in this dark hellhole. Dusk swathes her house, hinting at how long she's been unconcious; the limp bodies of her daughter and beloved pet are illuminated only by the diamond luminescence of stars. She maneuvers herself into a sitting position, pulling her child with her. One hand is clasped over the spot on the blood-stained lime green pajama top under which Marin's heart lays, still beating faintly.

She was so afraid to slip that trembling finger under Marin's nose, and in that momentary pause between breaths Addison was sure her heart was as faulty as her child's. But then there was a soft sensation, like tiny butterfly legs, upon her finger, and she knew the little girl lived.

They never tell you what a sweet, weakening elixir relief is.

"Mark," she gasps again, into the phone, and hears his breathing quicken in alarm. "I need you." She's unaware that a couple thousand miles away, Mark Sloan's eyes are shut tight and then reopened, as if he is trying to wake from a dream. But this is no dream.

"Is that really you, Addie?" He sounds hesitant, but hopeful.

"Yeah, Mark. It's really me," she breathes, a slight catch in her voice. "I'm sorry I didn't come when I could. I wanted to. But I couldn't. She needed me."

"Who – Addison, what are you talking about?" Mark demands gruffly.

"You have to help us. Please. We have to get out of here."

"We?"

Another sob rises in her throat; they're as steady and predictable as the waves that crash on the beach outside by now. "There's so much I haven't told you, so much you don't know. You might hate me," she states, despite Mark's wordless protest. "You might, but – you have to come for her."

"Addison, why did you call me?" Mark asks slowly.

A laden, pregnant silence. And then, "He hurt Marin."

"Who is Marin?" Mark asks, but in his heart he knows. _Addison's child._

"She's y -"

"Who the fuck are you calling?!" another, deeper voice interrupts, this cadence full of menace. "Give me the phone!" There is a crash, and ice invades Mark's heart; if he's too late … if he's too late he'll never forgive himself.

He hears the scuffle for the phone on the other end, and then the dial tone. Addison must have hung up.

On the faraway southern coast, Addison drops the dead phone and hugs her daughter closer, wincing as the movement disturbs ribs likely riddled with cracks. Her hand brushes a tuft of ginger fluff; Milo still hasn't moved and she's not brave enough to see if he lives as well.

"I'm going to ask you one more time," Jack says, his voice quiet but seething with fury. "Who were you calling?"

"Cooper," Addison lies quickly. "I was worried about Marin's heart, and he's a pediatri-"

"I know that," Jack interrupts. "But then why don't I believe you?"

"She's _two_! Two years old, and she's sick. I let you fuck around with me because it keeps her alive, I let you use her to control me because I thought if I could shoulder all of the hurt in this fucked up situation, she might turn out okay -"

"Shut up, Vivian," Jack growls, perhaps because they never talk about what's under the façade, as if they have both sworn to pretend forevermore.

"W-what – who is -?"

"I SAID SHUT UP!" His anger at himself and her are nearly equal now, he never meant to say that name, never meant to give her the power to discover and unlock him, because this is Addison, not Vivian, and Addison is smart. He can't look at the child, because he has done something he thought he would never do, yet in his mind, Addison pushed him toward this action, forced his hand.

For a second, the only sound that is heard is their shallow breathing. Addison searches Jack's eyes, as if answers are written in the emerald irises, as if her and Marin's fates can be determined.

She still jumps in surprise when Jack's foot collides with the phone; it skids away and then cracks against something as its motion is impeded, she recoils with Marin against her, worrying that they will meet similar fates, although she's unsure how much more either of their bodies can take.

Instead, Jack forcibly pulls Marin from her arms and lays the small girl against his shoulder roughly, her head of pale sunburst curls lolling, puppet-like, against her tall husband's shoulder. His ascent up the stairs echoes in Addison's ears and even though it will amount in her downfall, she stands carefully to follow, head spinning in disproportionate, night-splashed circles. She quickly glances around the living room; she has a feeling Jack is going to lock them up for this misdemeanor. Having learned from previous experiences, she now keeps non-perishable groceries in her room; the only thing left is the limp ginger body of her cat.

Addison threads her fingers through the feline's orangey fur, but unlike Marin, whose body still thumped and pulsed with life at her touch, Milo's is still, with little residual warmth remaining. Tears pool in her eyes as she remembers lonely nights during which he cuddled up to her chest, purring rhythmically, to reassure her before Marin ever existed. Giving the streamlined body one last stroke, Addison paces towards the stairs, clutching her ribs as she goes in a futile attempt to assuage the overpowering ache.

Jack intercepts her halfway up the carpeted steps and the two stare at each other, as if unable to believe what their short-lived love spawned: a monster of a man and the desperate shell of a once-strong woman. Then Jack wraps a muscled arm around her waist shoves her harshly up the stairs while her ribs scream in protest, and when she collapses on the floor with the door locked behind her, she gives into the obliterating pain.

*'*''*''*'*

Back under stormy Seattle skies decorated with dancing drops of liquid glass, Mark absently tucks his Blackberry into his scrub pocket, limbs numb as he ponders the gravity of the phone call he received at half-passed five.

Addison's husband hurt Addison, again. Addison's husband hurt Addison's child. Addison called _him_ and Addison needs _him_.

Sighing, he contemplates running up to his office to get the keys to his Porsche before remembering he got a ride from Callie and Arizona that morning. Callie's in a five-hour-long procedure, she won't be needing to drive anywhere anytime soon, he reassures himself as he slips into the attendings' locker room and shuffles around in her cubby for her keys. Heading toward the door, he runs smack-dab into a harried Arizona, whose sunshiny waves are arranged in a messy halo around her head in way that makes Mark decide not to mention that her salmon colored crocs are on the wrong feet.

"Mark!" she exclaims happily. "Callie wanted to know what you thought of our CD -"

"Um, right" he replies lamely, unable to scrounge up a greeting for his best friend's fiancée. "Uh, I actually have to go."

"Go where?"

"I got stuff to do, Blondie," he snaps gruffly, shouldering past her bright, effervescent, navy-scrubbed form.

"Aren't those Callie's keys?" Arizona demands, narrowing cornflower blue eyes suspiciously at Mark, who merely shrugs. "I'm going to tell her when she gets home from that five hour surgery. She might be kind of cranky when she hears you took her car," the peds surgeon beams.

"This is really important. Can you guys just get a ride with Yang and Hunt? I'll give it back tomorrow," Mark mutters, knowing he will be in LA and doing no such thing. However, right now he really just needs to get his ass to SeaTac because every second Addison is in danger, his heart pumps a little faster, a little more painfully.

"Where are you going, Mark?" Arizona demands, grabbing his arm, and she's stronger than her bubbly personality and thin frame would suggest. "Just because Derek is Chief doesn't mean you can leave work whenever you want."

The two battle wordlessly for a minute, before Mark, not wanting to cause a scene admits, "I lied to Callie. Addison isn't fine."

"What?" Arizona gasps, releasing his arm exactly as he had anticipated. "What are you talking about?"

"Ask her. Ask Callie who Marin is," he shouts over his shoulder as he sprints through the hospital, weaving around purposeful residents with their duck-like interns, the keys clutched tight in his fist. Callie's ash grey Lexus hybrid, courtesy of her father, is easy located near the front of the hospital and within seconds Mark is inside, revving the engine.

The twenty-minute drive to SeaTac is a blur of wet fallout from the angry clouds above as they storm, and Mark barely registers the trees nearly bent over under in the angry wind because the storm raging outside is nothing compared to the tempest within his mind, impairing his driving as he frets over Addie's situation. He doesn't remember parking, nor entering the airport, nor approaching the ticket counter, although logic implies he must have done all of those things.

"One ticket to LAX," he pants, pulling his wallet out of the back pocket of his scrubs. "Standby or whatever you have soonest."

"I'm sorry, sir," the immaculate blonde behind the corner smiles sympathetically, teeth white against a tan extremely unrealistic for Seattle. "Until the storm dies down, all flights are delayed."

"What – it's not that bad out there!" Mark protests.

"Not down here," the woman agrees, "but the wind is too strong up there for any planes to fly. We think maybe be this time tomorrow –"

"Tomorrow?" Mark moans. "I don't have until tomorrow. Does this airline have anything from Portland …?"

"I'm sorry. Unless this is a medical emergency or you work for the government, you're going to have to go to northern California or Nevada if you want to fly."

Or, at least, that's what he thinks she says; he's already out the door and into the rain, mentally calculating the distance between Seattle and Santa Monica.

Eighteen or nineteen hours lay between him and Addison.

And it repeats, like a mantra, again and again around his head: Who is Marin?

*'*''*''*'*

Dawn paints the new morning sky with sweeps of stardust fingers, dipping into lavender first, then rose, and finally apricot, and she knows she hasn't slept all night, not since she laid a hand on her cat to find him dead, not since Jack deposited her daughter so carelessly on the bed, not since Marin's sleep has been permeated with moans and whimpers and Addison has begin to suspect it's been caused by a concussion, which only exacerbates her worry.

Finally, when her bedroom has turned golden with morning, Addison pads into the bathroom and quickly locates the first aid kit she has hidden under the sink. The crouching motion causes her ribs to throb painfully and she ends up bent double, gasping for air, pain racing through her body like fire on oil.

Standing carefully, she lifts the thin, pale pink camisole she's been wearing for more than twenty-four hours and stares at the mangled, bruised mess underneath. Glancing back to where Marin slumbers, Addison covers her bare breasts with her injured left arm and begins taping the puffy plum skin with the other, wincing as she does. It isn't the best job she's ever done but now, at least, she can move her torso. Next she examines her shoulder, which, while still sore, isn't badly damaged, and wraps her likely broken but half-healed elbow in an ace bandage. There isn't much to do for the bruise visible on her hip under her short cotton pajama shorts so she pulls her shirt back over her head and returns to Marin.

The toddler's head, under her strawberry blonde locks, is bloody where it hit the wall, but will likely not need stitches. Tenderly, Addison wipes the crimson stain away to reveal and egg-sized bump, which she carefully covers with a cold compress. The ice cradling her head rouses the toddler, who utters a soft moan as her eyelids involuntarily peel back to reveal iris-contained skies.

The anomalous, unnatural angle of her daughter's arm, unnoticed until this moment, causes Addison's stomach to rebel, such that she must cover her mouth to keep from vomiting. Stained an ugly blue-purple, the limb is likely fractured in more than one place; Marin is lucky her bone hadn't broken the skin because a compound fracture is the last thing her delicate body needs at the moment. Still, the bones are clearly displaced and must be set, and while Addison may be no Callie she's confident that she can do it but nauseous at the thought of the additional pain this will cause Marin.

Breathing deeply and wishing to spare her daughter of the inevitable agony, Addison lifts the limb carefully, only to have Marin scream as her body convulses. An attempt to retract her arm towards her body only results in more violent throbbing, and the terrified child's sobs shake her entire body, such that she can't even articulate the word "ow."

"Rinny, Mommy needs you to hold still for a second," Addison coos gently, brushing back a few red-stained gold waves.

"Hwurts," Marin chokes, quite beside herself, seeing as nature did not prepare her or any child her age to deal with such pain.

"I know, baby. I know. Can you close your eyes? That will make it better," Addison lies, heart clenching as she does, for if Marin's arm is aggravating her now she can't imagine how it will be feeling in a few seconds. "Shh," she whispers, and then jerks Marin's displaced humerus back into position.

Addison thinks her soul might have torn a little when her baby's upper arm jerks and she screams again. She almost relieved when the cradling of her forearm causes the little girl to faint and she can wrap the arm tightly and secure it in a sling in relative peace. Tylenol is next; Marin swallows the viscous scarlet liquid involuntarily as she sleeps, eventually relaxing back into the pillows as her limp, lime-clad body slumps in adherence to the medicine.

Then she sinks down beside her daughter, pulling the little body close, and sleeps as well, imagining that Mark is on his way, if her calculations are correct he could arrive within eight hours. She takes a long draught of children's Tylenol and closes her eyes as well.

*'*''*''*'*

"_Ease up, boys!" he shouts as they ride the cerulean waves, soaring across water, into the port of New Haven and a scuffle of tanned arms and expensive deck shoes scramble to obey his orders. Under the influence of the fifteen strong boys of Yale's varsity sailing team, the boat slows so the reflective golden glare of the sun is cut more slowly by the hull._

"_Easy 'nough for you, Cap'n?" his first mate asks, bounding up beside him as the port, with her expensive flock of boats, comes into view._

"_Yes, and I so appreciate the sarcasm, James," twenty-one-year-old Alastair quips without turning to look at the impertinent crew member. "It's going to be the deciding factor on the medal for sure." White gulls dart over the boy's heads, making brave dips for French fries and other goods the tourists foolishly tote along like offerings to the god of the sea gulls. Under Alastair's unfailing guidance, the crew makes port, securing the shiny, snow-white vessel next to the other royal blue and gold crested ships._

_Alastair steps smartly onto the deck, leaving the others to clean up, and weaves through the bustling crowed in the direction of the university. His day only becomes better as he spots Doris Rutherford, dressed in an embroidered white mini-dress, leaning against his shiny red corvette. Instantly, his casual walk becomes something more of a strut as he approaches the golden-haired freshman, one of his latest conquests._

"_Dory," he greets with a predatory grin._

"_Al," the eighteen-year-old whispers in exchange, staring down at her virginal, innocent white shoes. "I have to talk to you."_

"_Talk away," Alastair invites gallantly as he opens the passenger door for her to step delicately in, unaware that by this young teenager's words, his lives, the lives of his two future daughters, one already conceived, and of the granddaughter who won't arrive for another fifty years, are to be forever changed; permanently set in the unwavering path that will lead to both joy and destruction._

"_I was … I was going to wait until you were done with practice," Doris says softly as they speed back the university campus, only a short drive away. "But I just couldn't, it's been on my mind all week, and -"_

"_Just spit it out, Dory," Alastair laughs. "You were never one to mince words."_

"_I'm pregnant," the young girl whispers, blue eyes focused on the writhing hands in her lap as a single tears escapes down her porcelain cheek._

"_You're what?" Alastair snaps, narrowly avoiding a crash and causing another driver to honk angrily at him. "That's can't be right … are you sure it's mine?"_

"_I've only been with you, Alastair," the girl exclaims tearfully, laying beseeching hands on his immaculate blue polo, but Alastair stiffens and pulls away, his warm, genial demeanor gone. "Really. You know I've only been with you."_

"_Do you have any idea what this could do to me?" Alastair snaps. "It was a good time, Doris, that's all; I wasn't going to marry you! I'm going to medical school; my parents are trying to fix me up with a Bradford Forbes, for goodness sakes."_

"_So what am I supposed to do? This is your baby!" Doris exclaims._

_Alastair digs around in his pocket as he steers his prized car, a hollow pleasure now, one handed. Coming up with several bills, he places them in Doris's lap. "I'll support you, pay for it," he says, aware of the danger his reputation has found itself in. "But don't tell anyone's it's mine." They pull up to the school, and Alastair stops the car, signaling Doris to leave without opening her door this time._

"_I was thinking about naming her Vivian, if it's a girl. Do you like that name?" she asks timidly, desperately, as the shining, golden god Alastair Montgomery walks away from her._

"_Sure," Alastair throws out carelessly before revving the engine._

*'*''*''*'*

Judging by the angle of the amber, incandescent orb in the sky, Addison sleeps for four hours before Marin's cries awake her again. Pressing a kiss to the damp forehead beneath her, Addison determines by the child's features that while she is uncomfortable, she is no longer in extreme agony, so she removes the compress and walks over to Marin's pale sleigh crib to get Kiki, the fluffy, cotton candly-colored polka-dotted blanket.

Then she arranges the pillows into a sort of nest, in the middle of which she situates Marin, who now has a juice box and small bag of Teddy Grahams as the door is still firmly locked and by the sound of it, blocked by a heavy piece of furniture.

"Mama? I wadch Staderry Tortcake?" Marin calls faintly from the bed, and Addison backs out of the closet to put the DVD in, arms full of Luis Vuitton luggage, reassured that her child is talking normally.

While Strawberry Shortcake is singing happily and skipping around in a world peppered with various delicacies, Addison scours her room for their most important possessions, the only ones that will accompany them to Seattle. Marin's clothes and toys are easy enough, as Jack rarely allows her to shop for new ones, but she deliberates for more than a few minutes over her extensive shoe collection, weighing Christian Louboutin against Prada and Manolo Blahnik, before she remembers that being with Mark and being free is worth more than any pair of shoes, no matter how beloved.

"We doin' on cashion?" Marin asks when she sees the full suitcases, which Addison zips before tucking under the bed, wary of Jack entering unannounced.

"Yeah, baby girl, we're going to Seattle," Addison murmurs faintly as she packs her cosmetics and Marin's favorite toys into an overnight bag.

"Dack?"

"No, Jack isn't coming," Addison assures her. "It's just going to be you, Mommy, and … and Daddy, Rinny."

"Dada?" Marin squeals. She's not completely able to comprehend the term, but she's seen enough happily ever after Disney movies to realize she is lacking a certain figure in her life.

"Yep," Addison smiles tightly, guilt dispersing through her as she remembers how her daughter spent two years without her father, and even more, how Mark was deprived of the beginning of his second child's life, just like his first.

"Wad 'bout beyla?"

"Beyla?" Addison asks in confusion, but Marin only points to the TV, where Strawberry Shortcake has been replaced by Dora the Explorer, who is chatting happily with her hyperactive monkey and her _abuela_. Bizzy has had little to do with Marin's life ever since she found out that the child wasn't Jack's, and Jack's stepmother, whom she has never met, is very involved in the socialite lifestyle, or so she has heard from Jack and Amy. In fact, Addison realizes she has never even seen a picture of the woman who replaced the late Augustine Deveraux, that she has never even heard Jack utter her name, but doesn't dwell on it, since she hopes to be completely free of Jack's life within a few hours.

"_Abuela_ means grandmother, Marin," Addison explains. "Your grandma and grandpa live in Seattle as well," she continues, thinking of Richard and Adele.

"I see?" the toddler pipes up.

"Yes, when we go to Seattle, you can see them," Addison promises as she secures the zipper on their last suitcase. "When we get to Seattle we can do anything you want."

"I wahna pway wif a octopush," Marin says.

*'*''*''*'*

As the wet pavement flies away beneath his tires, Mark reaches up to open the sunroof, hoping a slight breeze will keep him awake until he reaches Los Angeles. On the seat beside him several empty energy drink cans clank together; he only made it through the rainy, wet forests of Oregon and Washington on the caffeine provided by their sweet nectar. California has been more interesting, changing from dense foliage to open desert, and now to salty sea air as he follows the winding coast, exceeding the speed limit by more than a few miles.

He could be driving 200 miles an hour and it still wouldn't feel like he would get to Addison fast enough.

Briefly, trying to keep his mind occupied, Mark thinks of Derek and his promise to allow the neurosurgeon to accompany him to Los Angeles. However, he reminds himself, it hasn't quite been a month yet, and if anything should happen (from what he has gathered, Jack is dangerous) he doesn't want Derek, the father-to-be, to become mixed up in it.

Of course, the thought has occurred to him that he might be a father as well. As the sun dips lower in the sky, her fingertips brushing the glassy water, Mark tries to picture the little girl, the one whose life he is currently driving to save. As Addison did not specify her age in their brief, terrifying conversation, he is free to speculate about the paternity, wonder whether their rendezvous on her office floor, swathed in sunlight, or the melancholy goodbye later in her bed spawned a child. It's unlikely, he thinks, because he rather hopes she would have told him, but then again he sent her a letter full of things he wanted to tell her and she never saw a word of it.

Every time he blinks, behind his lids her body falls, an arc of perfection, red hair fanned out like a halo, and every time she falls, crashes, jolt unnaturally as her body is brought to an abrupt halt. Sometimes there is a redheaded child beside her, crying, hanging onto her skirt, staring at Mark through a curtain of bloodied bangs.

They're his ghosts, his vices, his purpose.

So he coaxes Callie's car faster.

*'*''*''*'*

This time, there's dried blood in Addison's mouth, infiltrating her senses with a tangy iron residue. For a second she simply lies there, head spinning, in the white comfort of the bed, until her limp arms manage to communicate that something is wrong, that they're empty of the warm being whose life hangs on the line.

Hot stabs of pain, like she's being knifed continually in the ribs, assail her as she pulls herself into a sitting position, only to find Jack with a sleeping Marin on his shoulder.

"What are you doing?" she asks, voice eroding throughout the question into almost a sob.

"I have to go to work, Addison," he says gruffly, moving toward the door. "And once again you have proved I cannot trust you, so I'm taking her with me."

She breaks a bit, as Marin's arm is jostled and a crystal droplet leaves a wet, shining trail down her cheek. She didn't know, until that moment, that someone could cry in their sleep.

*'*''*''*'*

He arrives just as the sun's fingers slip from the edge of the world and she sinks slowly to her death in the water before her incarnation in approximately twelve hours. The front door is open, which he finds odd as he traverses the sunshiny stone pathway, alight with a clump of ruby flowers here and there. The house is dark as well, and Mark is almost afraid to call, almost afraid to know.

His breathing becomes more ragged as he spots a blood-red stain on the wall adjacent to the kitchen, like something out of a horror movie. There is a small, sad lump nearby, and further inspection reveals it to be a dead cat. Mark stands slowly, wiping his shaking hands on the midnight scrubs he still wears, as if death is contagious and able to be caught, like a cold. No sooner has he draped the limp body with a hand towel sitting advantageously on the white tile of the kitchen counter than he hears a voice, almost angelic because it means she's a alive.

"M-Mark?"

"Addison?" The disbelieved voices Mark those of half a day ago, except now he can see her standing before him, in skimpy pajamas that reveal cuts and bruises in her delicate, creamy skin, at least for an instant, because then she is in his arms and he's swinging her around gently, her feet skimming the ground. He finally pulls back to kiss away a tear lingering on the bruised, blotchy skin around her eye, disregarding the moisture staining his own cheeks.

She's safe and beautiful, this fire-haired keeper of his heart, but like it or not, her smaller counterpart also possesses a portion of his most vital organ to call her own.

"Where is she?"

*'*''*''*'*


	8. Severing

_'*' Diary of Jane '*'  
Severing_

**Yes. This just happened. I am BACK, baby! And I have a lot of shit to do so if I have neglected your messages or you want to chat, feel free to pm me.**

*'*''*''*'*

"Where is she?" Mark inquires, keeping his arms firmly around her waist, as if she'd disappear into the sky if he let go like the balloons Marin tracked with one delicate finger in the clouds after she'd let go.

"Jack has her," Addison answers, assuming he is talking about Marin, although his feelings for the child are inscrutable, even as icy blueberry eyes meet hers and reveal the depth of emotion – sorrow, anger, wonder, longing – contained in their frozen depths. "He has this big case at work that he had to go in for, so he took her with him."

"How badly is she hurt?" he whispers, tucking a stray strand of sunburst behind her ear tenderly, his fingers lingering on her bruised face.

"Well, she … her arm is broken for sure, and she might have a minor concussion," Addison tells him, tears clouding her eyes as again and again, behind her eyelids, Jack shoves Marin away from her, and the small body hits the wall and goes limp. "But, that's not … all," she breathes. "Marin, she's sick, really sick. She was born with Congestive Heart failure and Ebstein's anomaly and she's been on medicine from the moment she was born."

"God," Mark sighs. "I am so, so sorry, Addie, so sorry. I can't even imagine …"

"She's so beautiful. Beautiful like you wouldn't believe … I look at her, and she's the best thing I've ever done, Mark. When I was pregnant with her, I used to lay out under the stars and even her movements made me feel so content …" Addison sighs, lost for a minute in the memories, in times now long dissolved, times when the baby girl growing under her skin had a future, would be loved more than even her mother could yet fathom. That was when she believed those tiny, paper-thin hands would someday hold a tube of sparkly lip gloss that would be painted across perfect rosebud lips, that giggles would erupt from those developing vocal cords and an unfortunate fall would result in grass stains on the knees covered by pale pink tights.

"The doctors gave her heart five or six years, at most." The anguished murmur spawns noxious clouds of fear that render both parents, one unaware of his relation, unable to breathe. "After that, if we can't find a donor … she'll die."

Tendons and ligaments tighten in Mark's sculpted jaw as he absorbs this information, the pain on his face, even with his eyes obscured, is almost too much for her to bear. "I need to see her."

"That's not … Mark, you can't. Not yet. If Jack saw you …" The terrifying implications of her words are clear.

"You stayed here because of her, Addison!" The emotion seethes through Mark's pores, he's been internalizing for nearly a month and during that time, both she and her child came dangerously near to death. "You didn't tell me about her. I didn't know you were pregnant, or that _he _might be raising my kid, or that he was beating you, because you didn't tell me and you weren't brave enough to leave." She understands Mark's desperate frustration, experiences it herself every time Jack bears Marin away to work with him, but her husband is erratic and capricious and she will take no chances with Marin's life.

"I couldn't leave," Addison mumbles quickly, desperately, willing her lips to impart the story, but she's held it together for so long and she's finally falling apart. "I didn't know the dose of Digoxin. Jack took her to the doctor when she had an adverse reaction, Jack knows it, but I don't, and even if I guess …"

"You could kill her. Shit," Mark breathes, gathering her thin frame into his arms again. He buries his nose in her scented cherry locks, as if they could stay could stay here together forever, in this moment, and their residual love could melt the nightmare. "We need to get you two outta here."

"I have stuff packed," Addison says quickly, glancing uneasily at the door, knowing Jack could burst in at any moment. "Mine and Marin's, it's ready, and I have her other medicine. We'll need groceries -"

" – I can pick some up -"

"I'll look for her medicine while he's gone," Addison says vaguely, her mind on hyperdrive as hope infiltrates her veins thanks to Mark's heady touch. "Then tomorrow -"

"Tomorrow?" Mark interjects, distressed, his large hands tightening around her upper arms. "But -"

"You have to go," she murmurs, although paradoxically clutches him closer. "Last time Jack found out you were here … it wasn't pretty."

The tendons in Mark's strong jaw tighten in anger, but he nods, following her gaze to the fairy-tale white door and sighing. "What do you want me to pick up?"

"Non-perishable snacks, I guess. Everything else we can get as take-out, because Mark, once we go, I don't want to stop."

"Okay."

"You'll have to get Marin from Jack," she continues, a plan formulating in her mind from shards of desperation and residual wishes as she speaks. "I found out … he's been keeping her in his office, to make sure I can't get her from the daycare. He rarely leaves his office, except when he's at court, but he will for his sister, Amy. I can talk to her … tell her, I think she'll help. He won't want to take Marin when he leaves, so offer to watch her for a second – you can pretend to be a client. I'll wait outside with the car and hopefully Rinny's medicine."

"What time should I come tomorrow? I think we should take Callie's car, I filled it up just before I drove here …"

"You took Callie's car?" she asks with her patented raised eyebrow, grinning incredulously, not only because of Mark's actions but because for the first time in a while, something is funny again.

"The Porsche only has two seats," he explains with a shrug and she's touched that even though he doesn't know the paternity of the child he returned for, he still keeps her in mind.

"Eight. Get here at eight. Jack has a really important client tomorrow that he's been talking about all week, so I'm sure he'll leave early. We can pack the car and make sure we have everything we need."

"Okay. Addison -"

"Pick up some coffee too, and maybe some energy drinks. It's an eighteen hour drive, and with Marin it will be nineteen or twenty …"

"Addie!"

"What?"

"Is she … I mean …" But he finds he can't ask about Marin, not when they're all in danger, not when something so insignificant as paternity doesn't matter. Either way, he knows he will raise her, will lead her by a gloved hand through the chilly autumn of Seattle to elementary school, will read her stories before bed using different voices just to make her giggle, will carry her on his shoulders so she can have the best view of the Bainbridge Island 4th of July parade of any little girl present.

Instead he presses his lips to hers, trying to convey with the molding of lips what he can't with words, attempting to impart to her the insatiable longing that assaults him every time she leaves his life. Addison gasps a little into his mouth, the small intake of breath is endearing and all he can do is kiss her harder, more thoroughly, until he notices the faint trace of something coppery and tangy in her mouth. He may not be an undying freak, but he knows what blood tastes like.

His hesitation provides Addison with the opportunity to pull away. Breathing hard, one arm clutched awkwardly against her chest, the broken love of his life shoves him toward the door, and it is all Mark can do to remember that he does get to come back and spirit her away.

"Thank you for … you know," she mumbles as he fumbles with the screen door, unwilling to put any barrier, no matter how insignificant, between them. The angle of her body reveals another violet bruise blossoming just under her ear, where skull meets spine.

"Addie … I'll always come for you," he whispers, trying to catch her gaze, and for an instant in eyes the color of the Mediterranean Sea, he sees a spark of the emotion that made him betray his best friend, the affection that has kept him wanting since medical school. Then she's gone, disappeared back into the house now haunted with pain and ghosts of who they used to be, and he thinks that's all he gets, this little glimpse of her, this tenuous promise of salvation to last him until tomorrow. But Addison is back before he gets far and their bodies are flush against each as she presses a large, heavy book into his arms.

Then he's alone with only the night as his company, and her chilly arms make promises he isn't sure she can keep.

*'*''*''*'*

"Callie!" The name of her lover and fiancée bursts forth from Arizona's lips before she can contain it and the beautiful Latina looks startled as she exits the scrub room with Owen Hunt. But her following smile, prompted only by Arizona's presence, makes the blonde woman doubt the existence of the stars or sun or any celestial body, really, because Callie's smile is so beautiful that it blinds her to all else. For a second, the mysterious Marin is far from her mind as they inhabit their own paradisiacal microcosm and embrace.

It is only when Callie mentions home that Arizona remembers they are lacking a car.

"Cal," she asks hesitantly, because she knows relatively little about the mess that was Addison and Mark and only a bit more about the chaos that was Mark and Callie. She's not afraid of the past, but, after divulging their respective histories, she wants to focus on the future. And they have been, until now.

Arizona may not yet be ready for a child, but what she saw in Mark Sloan's eyes when he mentioned the name Marin … made her sure that not only did he have a heart after all, but something had turned it to ice. "Who is Marin?" she blurts, her sharp, robin's-egg eyes intent on Callie's face.

Callie looks stunned; her arms fall limply from Arizona's hips. It's not a common name, she treats enough children to know that, and Callie's reaction certainly is telling. "Cal?" she prompts.

"Where … Zona, where did you hear that name?"

"Why does it matter?"

"Three years ago, Mark went to LA to get Addison to operate on Sloane."

"So?" Arizona retorts. "Everyone knows that. It's not exactly a secret. You know what else isn't a secret? That he was involved with Addison there. That's old news. But you know more," she accuses, as betrayal seeps slowly down from her cranial realizations.

"She swore me to secrecy," Callie defends, lifting her hands, which still smell faintly of latex-free gloves, into the air. "Mark left her and ended up with Grey. Addison was devastated and ended up with a baby. _Mark's _baby. But she – Addison and Marin – are in LA with Jack. Why does this matter?"

"I don't know, Cal, but Mark mentioned the name Marin while he was rushing out of the locker room with your keys. And he said Addison is not okay."

*'*''*''*'*

Mark began shopping for groceries by himself at the tender age of eleven. The cooks his parents hired over the years prepared gourmet meals that he only ate on holidays, and after he began refusing the caviar and ratatouille leftovers, money was set aside every few weeks and he walked himself down to the dairy mart, often with Derek tagging along, to purchase chocolate milk and peanut butter.

Now, however, as he enters a supermarket halfway between Addison's house and the hotel he selected but barely saw, he's at a complete loss. What if Addison is a health-freak mother? What if Marin is allergic to gluten? What if she _isn't _his so she _isn't _genetically programmed to like chocolate chip cookies? Are babies supposed to have fruit snacks?

"Shit," Mark curses as he studies different flavors of crackers, causing a scandalized nearby mother to glare and push her shopping cart quickly from the aisle. He's tempted to call her back just so he can watch what snacks she selects for her young son, but as he can't exactly execute the escape tomorrow from jail, he decides not to push his luck. Instead he throws random boxes in the cart, hoping she likes fish crackers and snacks shaped like Scooby Doo and fruit-flavored princesses and M&M cookies and pink lemonade juice boxes. Next he follows them with one of each flavor of energy drink and some bottled Starbucks frappuccinos before checking out.

Mark supposes he somehow made it out to his car, loaded the food in the trunk, and sat himself behind the wheel, but as he cannot even recall Artemis bringing dusky night, he cannot be exactly sure what transpired. The sky outside is the smog-stained color of ink, the lights little droplets of sunlight, illuminating the way for bustling shoppers. The world continues all around him, but he, Mark, cannot move.

None of this was ever supposed to happen. Had he known it was going to, he wouldn't have let go of Addison's hand once in New York – not when she was with Derek and afraid he would come home, not when she was pissed at him and tried to use the appendage in question to slap him. Whether she loved him or not, he is convinced that his mere presence would have kept her safer, although he knows the false nature of such an assumption – she was not safe even in Seattle, not from him, not from herself.

Sighing, he starts the car and backs out of the parking space, glancing half-heartedly behind him. Time lapses again as he drives and he's alone in the fancy hotel room, beer open in his hand, bare-chested on the bed. The caramel-colored liquid assuages his thirst, but not his sorrow, and he turns his attention for the first time to the book Addison pressed into his arms. It is heavy, and obviously important, and at first he assumed it was a photo album. But what purpose would she have for handing that to him today instead of tomorrow? Hands trembling, he slips his dexterous fingers under the pale pink cover and opens a beautifully crafted scrapbook.

On the first page is a sonogram, with a small whitish bean surrounded by Addison's murky uterus and abdomen. It's not much, she couldn't have been much more than eight weeks along, and yet he can't help tracing his finger over where the baby's spine would be and trying to see non-existent fingers and toes. That small blob grew into Marin, a real, living, breathing human who he has yet to meet.

The next page is more ultrasound images; by the looks of it Addison had one about every month or more, and in each one the baby develops peacefully, unaware of the impossible hand of cards life will deal her. He flips again and the words hit him hard with a truth he hoped for all along but never truly comprehended.

_Marin Arabelle Montgomery Sloan,_ it reads, framing a picture of Addison with matted hair but no less gorgeous than usual, in his opinion, cuddling a newborn pink-skinned baby. Marin _Sloan_, he thinks. She's his baby girl, with eyes like open oceans and pale, faint orange fluff on top of her head. She's stunning.

The next page, however, depicts the same baby in an incubator, hooked up to wires and with bandages across her chest. Her small pink hat is a little large for her, but not as large as the apparatus holding the little girl is. _"Heart surgery," _Addison had said, only a few hours after she was born. While he was in Seattle, agonizing and playing cat and mouse with Lexie, flirting with the idea of proposing, enamored with the idea of love and following in Derek's footsteps out of pure habit, his daughter, his baby girl, was having heart surgery.

Mark is a man starving for the second child he latently discovered as he flips every page, watching as they remove bandages to reveal a scar seared across porcelain skin, although as tubes and machines lessen, a dark-haired man appears more and more. In the photo of Addison leaving the hospital with Marin in a baby seat, a strawberry binky between her plump lips, he is just an arm tucked around Addison's waist, the rest of his body cut out of the photo. He's a shadow in a sunny beach portrait, a crouched figure as Marin begins to walk, the side of a head in a captured memory of an Oceanside Wellness gathering, but still, he's there, where Mark could have and should have been. Each page is both a gift and a curse, because he gets these moments of his daughter, naked except for sand on the beach as she evades her mother, wispy hair curled into a thin ponytail on top of her head as she attends her first wedding, but he gets vexatious reminders of Jack with every photo he flips.

Sometime, Mark realizes, he must have lapsed into slumber, because although it is still dark when wakefulness touches his eyes, the darkness has changed colors as it hastens towards dawn. Marin's scrapbook is facedown against his bare chest, as close to his heart as anything can physically get. Today, he will meet his daughter.

With Sloane, their first meeting was colored with shock and discord and panic. It wasn't that he didn't want her, but she was a surly, pregnant teenager dumped upon him by her incapable mother; it wasn't a fair situation; it wasn't the way he would have wanted to meet his firstborn child. Now he hopes to make his first interaction with his second-born more meaningful and poignant, as he missed out on her birth as well.

*'*''*''*'*

Amy Deveraux is struggling to pull a frog-patterned shirt over her son Ethan's head when the first shrill ring sounds through her house. Sighing softly, she continues to tug on the stubborn cotton with one hand as she picks up the phone with the other, as her husband is still in the shower.

"Mommy!" Three-year-old Ethan yells when he senses the division of her efforts between him and a phone. Her child, whose fawn-brown waves are barely sticking through the top of the t-shirt, has developed a rather unfortunate propensity for shouting every type of verbal communication just shy of his third birthday, and she and Eric have yet to eradicate the habit.

"Yes, honey, okay," she reassures her son before taking a quick glance at the caller id, which reads _Montgomery, Addison_, as her sister-in-law deigned not to change her last name. Amy's thoughts turn quickly to her niece Marin and she answers the call even as Ethan is still struggling. "Hello? Addison?"

"Amy." Addison sounds equal parts relieved and weary, but she doesn't elaborate on her brief statement, prompting Amy to guess correctly that there is something seriously wrong.

"Addie, you're scaring me," the young woman breathes into the receiver, trying to provoke a response out of her sister-in-law. "Is Marin okay? What's going on?"

"I need you to do something for me."

"Okay, I'm going to need a little more than that," Amy says cautiously, wary of the abject fear in Addison's voice. Fibers stretch and the shirt finally slips down over the crown of Ethan's head, and the boy uses the opportunity provided by his mother's confusion to slip out of her waiting arms and the dreaded pants next intended for them. Amy strains her ears over Ethan's shouts of freedom, but Addison is silent.

Finally, she hears, "Jack. Your brother, he …"

"He what? Jack what? Addison, _please_!"

"He gets angry sometimes." A cold feeling settles over Amy's body, like snow falling softly upon dendrites, slowly wrapping her in ice, because Addison can't be saying what she seems to be trying to. Not her brother. Not Jackie.

"What do you mean?" Amy demands, perhaps more harshly than she intended.

"Meet me in the lobby of your brother's office at eight-fifteen sharp," Addison says, "and I'll show you what I mean." Then she ends the call.

Amy checks the time on the microwave. It's 7:45. "Eric!" she calls. "Ethan and I are leaving early!"

*'*''*''*'*

The building towers above them, a pagan god looking down upon his simple, earthly subjects. His daughter is somewhere up there.

"Remember, you're a client," Addison says from the driver's seat of Callie's care, the latter of which is going to kill him for letting the former drive, unless motherhood has impressed better driving skills upon Addison. The small space smells like new fabric and plastic, courtesy of the lavender butterfly carseat in the back row of seats, prepared with blankets and animals full of fluff.

"I know, Addison."

"Amy should call as soon as you get up there, so you shouldn't have to make up a case. Just chat him up a bit, make a comment about Marin, and, as he tries to leave, offer to watch her. And remember -"

"I _know_, Addison, okay!" he snaps out of aggravation and nervousness. After all, he humored her the first thirty times she wanted to go over 'The Plan.'

"Sorry," Addison whispers, and he hates the meekness in her voice, so he leans over and presses a lingering kiss to the smooth expanse between her jawbone and her neck. She gives a slight shiver, suddenly tears grace the dashboard.

"I'll be right back with her," he promises.

"Remember to go out the back exit -" Addison murmurs, grabbing hold of his wrist to keep him from leaving.

"God dammit, I know!" Mark shouts, and before he can waste any more time, he pops open the car door, smooths his pearl grey suit and pale purple dress shirt, and slams the door. He allows the building to swallow him up, catching one last glimpse of Addison parking near a dark-haired woman and her son, who are clearly waiting. Amy, Jack's little sister, Addison had explained. She had doubted Addison's implications on the phone, but Mark knows the bruises will convince her. They'd convince anyone.

He clenches bunches of fabric against his legs as he approaches the elevator casually, almost at a stroll. A quick peek at the listing of offices and names reveals that Jack is on the eighth floor in suite 122. A woman smiles at him cheekily while in the metal contraption, and he thinks fleetingly at Derek. Mark can't even manage a polite grimace in return; his stomach is churning anxiously, his entire body cooled by the shin shimmer of sweat covering it. He steps off. Suite 100, 110, 114, and …

It's a simple wooden door, surrounded by expansive windows and blinds, adorned with the words _Jack Deveraux, attorney-at-law_. The secretary in the antechamber is absent. He knocks, entire body quivering. The door is opened to reveal a face Mark has only seen in photographs. Anger courses through his veins like a drug, his grip on his pocket-linings more than doubles.

This is the source of all of Addison's pains. This man hurt his defenseless daughter.

"Can I help you?" the voice is cultured, smooth, and Mark has never wanted to wipe the smirk off an accompanying face more.

Instead, Mark proffers his hand, resisting the urge to attempt to glean a peek inside. "I'm Dr. Stone," he says, using his deepest, most intimidating voice. "I'm in a bit of trouble, if you know what I mean." Mark punctuates this statement with a feral grin.

For whatever reason, be it the expensive suit, Mark's forthrightness, or a feeling of kinship with a fellow wrongdoer, Jack takes to Mark and completes the handshake. "I'm Jack Deveraux," he says amicably. "And it's a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Stone, but medical-legal disputes aren't my specialty."

"Why don't you call me Derek," Mark offers the first name that comes to mind, no doubt lingering because of his childhood best friend's ridiculous elevator sensibilities. "And no worries, this isn't a medical issue. I've done my homework."

"By all means, come in then," Jack offers, "I've got a few minutes before I'm due at court." Then he does what Mark has been waiting for him to do all along: he steps aside.

A little strawberry blonde angel sits in the corner, her stormy eyes troubled and ringed with the reddish aftermath of crying, the chest of her pajamas stained with tears. She looks up and his heart begins to soar.

*'*''*''*'*


End file.
